What You Knead
by Agent Malkere
Summary: It started, as most things did in Kakashi's life, with a mission gone wrong. (In which Kakashi accidentally acquires an emotionally healthy coping technique.)
1. Chapter 1

**_What You Knead_**

 _By Agent Malkere_

* * *

It started, as most things did in Kakashi's life, with a mission gone wrong. The information on their target had been bad, and no one on Kakashi's ANBU squad had made it back to Konoha unscathed. One hadn't made it back at all. Kakashi, for his part, had returned on a squad mate's back, semi-conscious after getting his leg caught in a particularly nasty earth jutsu. His leg had required surgery to fix properly, and now Kakashi was out of the hospital on crutches and a month of enforced medical leave.

Kakashi's first stop after leaving the hospital was the library. He had a grace period of maybe two hours before that last shot of painkiller they had given him wore off, and Kakashi planned to take full advantage of it. Once it wore off completely, it would be a couple of days at least before he'd be able to leave his apartment. He hated being stuck in his apartment without anything new to read. ( _Icha Icha_ was great, but there were only so many times in a row that you could read the same book without it getting tedious.)

Kakashi hobbled through the library grabbing books of shelves more or less at random. He was generally willing to read pretty much anything, and he didn't have time to browse titles today. He managed to fit eight books into the bag the librarian had lent him (since he didn't exactly have any free hands), and didn't bother looking more closely at any of them than that before he made it home.

Later, lying on his bed as the last of the pain medicine wore off, Kakashi sorted through his haul. A historical romance, a book on philosophy, two volumes about Fire Country myths and lore, a political history of Kiri, a fictionalized account of a silk trader's life during the First Great Shinobi War, a book about blacksmithing, and-

Kakashi blinked at the last book in his hands. _The Art and Science of Bread_? He'd actually managed to grab a _cookbook_?! Kakashi tossed it aside with a frustrated sigh. Well, that was a bust – he had no interest in reading recipes.

Seven out of eight wasn't so bad. Kakashi picked up one of the books of myths and lore and settled back with a wince to read.

* * *

A week and a half later, Kakashi stood gloomily in the grocery store. He was down to one crutch, but his leg still hadn't healed enough for him to start training again. (The med-nin had told him with a wide and terrifying smile that Kakashi could either wait the appropriate amount of time to heal or be permanently crippled – the choice was entirely up to him.) Kakashi had just about finished off his stack of books and was starting to go stir crazy. It didn't help that the nightmares were picking up again without the full body exhaustion of training and missions to keep them at bay. If he stood still too long, the darkness of his own thoughts always caught up with him. Limping around the grocery store was at least marginally better than staying cooped up in his apartment. He needed something that he could _do_ -

Blue and white packaging caught Kakashi's eye. He stared at the bag of flour. Well… he had ended up with that cookbook, hadn't he? Bread was just flour, water, salt, and yeast, right? What the hell, why not? Kakashi grabbed the bag of all-purpose flour and one of the brown jars of instant yeast (because 'dry active' yeast sounded vaguely suspicious) and headed to the front of the store.

It couldn't hurt. It had to be better than being left alone with his own thoughts.

Kakashi may have overlooked a few key pieces of information – like the fact that he didn't own any measuring cups. Or a baking tray. Or a mixing bowl. He did have some spoons, though, so he improvised. A pot he usually used to reheat soup was repurposed into a mixing bowl, and Kakashi more or less guessed at ingredient amounts by using a drinking glass to measure the flour and water. A soup spoon was used to guess amounts of yeast and salt.

By the time Kakashi was done, what he mostly had was a mess, but sitting in the middle of it all was something vaguely recognizable as a lump of dough. As far as light arm workouts went, Kakashi hadn't minded the kneading part too much even if he had ended up wearing a liberal amount of flour.

He abandoned the dough to its own devices in another pot greased with the last dregs of a bottle of vegetable oil that he hadn't even realized he owned and threw a clean shirt over top of it because that was the closest thing to plastic wrap and a dish towel that he had. Five chapters of historical romance later, the dough ball had puffed up a bit. The dough mostly stuck to his hands when Kakashi tried to reshape it like the recipe told him to. By the time Kakashi dumped the lump into the semi-greased frying pan that he was using in place of a baking tray, probably half the amount of dough the recipe called for remained. Kakashi just shrugged, read a few more chapters of his book (because you were apparently supposed to leave the dough alone a second time), and then threw the whole lot in his oven. Then the plot of the historical romance picked up, and he sort of forgot about the bread until his nose picked up the faint scent of burning.

The lump of dough hadn't so much turned into a loaf as simply gotten even more misshapen and slightly burnt. It was semi-stuck to the bottom of the frying pan, and when Kakashi cut it open for curiosity's sake, it had slightly less aeration than cheese. It was completely inedible.

Kakashi stared down at the pathetic loaf. He'd completely and utterly fucked it up beyond a shadow of a doubt and-

And-

It was okay.

Nobody was hurt. Nobody was dead or dying.

He'd completely screwed up, and the only thing left on his hands was flour.

Kakashi had failed at something, and _it was okay_. That had never happened before.

The pathetic not-really-bread went in the garbage, the frying pan was left in the sink to soak, and the historical romance was abandoned in favor of the "science of bread" section of the cookbook. Kakashi left his apartment the next morning with a comprehensive list of all the supplies he needed.

* * *

Kakashi had never come across anything that he wasn't good at with little effort before. Baking did not come effortlessly to him. It should have been frustrating, but it wasn't. It was a relief. It was just a loaf of bread. It didn't have to be perfect, because nobody's life was at stake. Village safety wasn't on the line. So what if Kakashi over-proofed his dough or added way too much flour? Nobody cared.

By the end of his enforced medical leave, Kakashi could bake a passible loaf of basic bread, the med-nin was practically _giddy_ with how well Kakashi's leg had healed, and there was a mountain of misshapen bread loaves in the ANBU base kitchen that _nobody knew the source of_. (It was the cause of much paranoia.) Kakashi returned seven of his eight books to the library, handed the librarian a fistful of ryo, and told her that _The Art and Science of Bread_ had gotten lost on the road of life. Then he asked if the library had a baking section.


	2. Chapter 2

After a year of baking, Kakashi thought he was starting to get pretty good. Waking up in the middle of the night from a nightmare and making bread dough until his hands were covered in nothing but flour rather than blood worked so much better than anything else. Better even than training himself to exhaustion. Needless to say, he'd made a _lot_ of bread in the past year. He'd read everything about bread he could find in the library's – admittedly small – baking section. He'd also been working on refining a mist jutsu he'd copied in Kiri so that he could use it to keep his oven humid and get a better crust on his loaves.

He hadn't been spending as much time at the Memorial Stone lately. There was only so long that you could leave bread dough proofing before all the yeast gave up, and you got sad pancake bread. So if Kakashi talked to his dough while he kneaded it sometimes instead of the actual Memorial Stone, well, he didn't think that any of his lost friends would mind. Actually, Obito was probably laughing his ass off in the afterlife over Kakashi baking bread, so at least what he was doing had entertainment value. He'd moved his old team photo to the small window ledge in his kitchen. In some ways, he preferred talking to the picture to talking to the stone.

Kakashi was part of Naruto's ANBU guard detail tonight. His sensei's son had just started at the Academy, and Kakashi had been hoping that Naruto would finally be able to make some friends, but so far no luck. It was deeply disturbing and made Kakashi question what little faith he had left in humanity (tiny thimbleful that it was). Kakashi had been keeping his distance due to a combination of orders, trauma, and, well, ANBU was sort of known for its ridiculously high turnover rate. It seemed unfair to introduce himself to Naruto when he tended to disappear abruptly without any warnings and no guarantee of coming back alive – or even a particularly high probability of coming back alive for that matter. And Kakashi was an ANBU captain. He was basically living on borrowed time. But-

But Naruto looked so unhappy. And Kakashi was still too lost in his own head and darkness to be able to talk to the kid directly but, well….

Kakashi wondered how hard it would be to make pork buns.

* * *

The answer was the _bun_ part wasn't that hard – it was just an enriched dough, and Kakashi had been getting better with those. The _pork_ part, on the other hand, was causing a multitude of problems. Namely because Kakashi had been spending the past year teaching himself how to _bake_ not _cook_. The most he really knew how to do when it came to cooking was mediocre omelet. Well, he could also reheat soup and leftovers and work the rice cooker, but that didn't really count.

Pork was a lot trickier than omelet.

Kakashi had already managed to burn the outside of one pork tenderloin while somehow leaving the middle raw. He'd also set off the smoke detector in his kitchen twice before he'd finally pulled out the batteries. At this rate, actually producing an edible pork bun might require some sort of divine intervention.

 _Thud. Thud. Thud._

And now someone was pounding on his door.

…

Who the hell did he know who would actually knock on his door?

Kakashi abandoned the charred remains of the tenderloin and went to investigate.

There was an unfamiliar chuunin with a ponytail and a scar across his nose on the other side of his door. Kakashi blinked at him, wondering if he was lost.

"Can I help you?" he finally asked.

The chuunin shook his head slightly as if trying to clear it.

"Yes, I live in 3A down the hall, and I just wanted to make sure that you'd set your apartment on fire on purpose rather than by accident."

Kakashi blinked at him a second time and then took note of the gray clouds of smoke billowing down the apartment hallway. Hmmm… he probably should have opened a window after the smoke detector went off the second time.

"I'm trying to cook pork tenderloin," he muttered absently, mostly to himself. If he opened the window at the far end of the hall, a quick wind jutsu ought to take care of the smoke before it set off the building's sprinkler system.

"Pork tenderloin?" the chuunin repeated, sounding bewildered. "You set your apartment on fire cooking _pork_?!"

"It's not on fire – just smoldering," Kakashi corrected, waving him off and not really paying attention. Now what wind jutsu could he use that would get rid of the smoke but also not put any holes in the walls…? Kakashi didn't notice the chuunin's expression shift from slack jawed shock to long suffering irritation.

"Gods save me from _jounin_ ," the chuunin muttered under his breath and shouldered his way past Kakashi into the apartment. Kakashi was so surprised that he didn't even try to stop him.

Nobody had just barged into his apartment like that since… since the last time Kushina had visited with Minato-sensei. For once the thought was more melancholy than an aching well of pain.

Kakashi shook off the thought and chased after the chuunin who had invaded his apartment. He found him vigorously flapping a baking tray at an open window to try to encourage the smoke to leave. An appropriately laid back wind jutsu finally presented itself in Kakashi's mind for consideration. Yeah, that ought to work. Kakashi ran his hands through the three simple seals.

" _Soyokaze no jutsu_."

A brisk breeze swept around Kakashi's apartment and then funneled out the open window, taking the majority of the smoke with it and leaving the chuunin looking rather windswept.

The chuunin opened his mouth, but Kakashi held up a finger before he could say anything.

"Hold that thought." Then he hurried out of his apartment to take care of the smoke in the hall. If he set off the building's sprinkler system, his landlord would kill him, and she was the retired head of T&I. She was a lady to be feared and pay tribute to, and she had no qualms about cutting off anyone's hot water.

Once the hall was only vaguely smoky instead of alarmingly gray, Kakashi headed back inside. The chuunin was in his kitchen now, inspecting the charred husk of the pork tenderloin. Kakashi had to squash the urge to grab his team photo off the window ledge and hide it. The chuunin was also holding Kakashi's container of baking soda and looking much calmer now that he was no longer wreathed in smoke.

"Some of the grease in the bottom of your oven had caught fire," he explained, waving the container of baking soda. "I put it out. It looks like you had your oven rack too high."

"Oh." Kakashi peered into his oven which now had a liberal coating of baking soda on its bottom. _Right_ – he'd finished that cheese flatbread off under the broiler to get it to crisp properly and then had forgotten to move the rack back down. Oops. He probably should have noticed that his oven was on fire. That was going to be a pain to clean out.

"It's a simple enough fix," the chuunin offered. "Just move the oven rack down and use a tray with edges so the fat doesn't drip." There was none of the censure in his tone that Kakashi had been expecting. "What were you trying to make?"

"Ah," Kakashi rubbed the back of his head and laughed self-deprecatingly, "pork buns. I'm a-" Kakashi hesitated, because he hadn't actually _told_ anyone about the bread, though the grocery store clerk probably had a pretty good idea at this point. But he'd never actually said the words out loud. Not to anyone living, anyway. He plunged on, "I'm a decent baker, but it seems cooking is a bit beyond me."

Part of Kakashi was braced, waiting for the ridicule, the judgement, the snort of disgust that an elite shinobi _baked_ in his spare time of all things. But it never came. The chuunin just smiled at him.

"I have the exact opposite problem – I'm a decent cook, but I can't bake to save my life. I-" The chuunin hesitated. "I could help you out if you would like."

Kakashi was an ANBU captain. He had a life expectancy that could probably be measured better in months than years. It wasn't fair of him to get close to people only to die. And even if _he_ didn't die, the people who got close to him inevitably did, and he didn't want to end up with this man's blood on his hands, too, but-

But he _really_ wanted to make those pork buns for Naruto. Kakashi was too damn lost in his own head and nightmares to approach him directly, to talk to him the way he knew Minato-sensei and Kushina would have hoped, but he still wanted to _do_ something for Naruto. Something to make the kid smile. The only things Kakashi was any good at were killing things and baking. Going on a killing spree would help exactly nothing. And Naruto had just started at the Academy, and he needed more protein in his diet, and he really like pork ramen so… pork buns.

And Kakashi really did need the help.

"Well," Kakashi began after a slightly too long pause, "I have another tenderloin, but I'm all out of soy sauce."

"I have more soy sauce back in my apartment," the chuunin offered.

"In that case," Kakashi bowed from the waist with purposefully exaggerated formality to hide his lingering anxiety, "I accept your gracious offer of help. I desperately need it."

The chuunin laughed a little and rolled his eyes.

"I'm Iruka Umino, by the way," he told Kakashi as he put down the baking soda.

"Kakashi Hatake."

"Nice to meet you."

Later, with the second pork tenderloin safely roasting on the correctly placed oven rack and absolutely nothing on fire or smoking in an upsetting way, Kakashi commented,

"So how can I repay you for saving that poor piece of pork from a horrible fate?"

Iruka laughed.

"You could always teach me that jutsu that you used to get rid of the smoke. I really could have used something like that when one of my students set off a stink bomb in my classroom yesterday."

Kakashi thought of Minato-sensei using that jutsu to flip Kushina's long hair into her face and wondered what Iruka would think if he told him that the Yondaime had specifically invented that jutsu to tease his wife.

"Sure, I could do that."

Maybe, just maybe, Kakashi could let someone else in again. Just this once.

* * *

Naruto didn't have many friends – in fact, he could count all of them on one hand – but that just made them all the more valuable. There was Hokage-jiji, of course, and Teuchi and his daughter, but Naruto also had a secret friend – Dog-san.

Dog-san was an ANBU, and he left Naruto pork buns. They weren't store bought pork buns, either – these were _homemade_. He could tell, because they tasted way better. Nobody had ever _made_ anything for Naruto before, and that made the pork buns extra special.

Naruto had only met Dog-san in person once so far. He had jerked awake from a nightmare in the middle of one night to find a tall ANBU man in a dog mask frozen in the act of leaving two pork buns on his bedside table. Naruto had blinked up at the stranger, who had stared right back. Then Dog-san had hesitantly reached out and ruffled Naruto's hair with one hand. He'd lifted one gloved finger to the lips of his mask and silently darted back out Naruto's window.

Naruto had asked Iruka-sensei about the ANBU after that, and Iruka-sensei had told him that ANBU were elite shinobi – skilled beyond jounin level, even – who went on the most dangerous missions. They lead hard lives and had to keep their identities a secret from everyone except the hokage in order to keep the village safe. They couldn't even talk to normal people.

Naruto thought that Dog-san must have be very lonely to have decided to be friends with him, but that was okay, because Naruto was lonely, too, so he was very glad that Dog-san did. Naruto now greeted any ANBU he saw with a smile and a wave, so that when he eventually saw Dog-san, he could wave at his friend without anyone getting suspicious. Naruto may have only been an Academy student, but he could do his part to keep his friend's identity safe.

Since the pork buns always appeared in the same place on Naruto's side table, sometimes Naruto left things for Dog-san in return. Little things. A short note, a picture he doodled during class, a particularly nice rock he'd found down by the river. It was tricky, because Dog-san's visits didn't seem to follow any sort of pattern and were sometimes quite far apart, but that was all right, because Naruto knew that his friend was off somewhere protecting the village.

Sometimes Dog-san left Naruto other things aside from the pork buns. Naruto now had a small collection of different shaped shells that he kept in a jar even though he had never seen the ocean. Dog-san had left him an entire _book_ on his birthday. It was called _The Tale of the Gutsy Ninja_ , and Naruto had found it sort of confusing and some of the words were hard, but he'd really liked that the main character had the same name as him.

Naruto was really looking forward to the day he became hokage and was able to meet his secret ANBU friend properly and thank him for all the pork buns.

* * *

 _A/N: There is at least one more chapter of this story still to come._


	3. Chapter 3

At this point, Kakashi could safely say that he was _good_ at making bread. He'd managed to become a genius of hard work as well as a regular genius, and if Gai ever found out, Kakashi would probably have to do something drastic – like become a missing-nin. Iruka joked that he ought to open a bakery, and the predominant theory around the ANBU base was that they were being haunted by the vengeful spirit of a baker whose shop had been the collateral damage of a mission gone wrong and _don't touch that bread – you don't know where it came from!_

Kakashi probably would have told his fellow ANBU members the source of all the bread if they weren't being so _hilarious_ about it. Well, Tenzou and Shisui knew at this point. The three of them had gone on a month long mission together, and Kakashi may have brought a sealing scroll full of premade flatbread dough and a skillet to cook it over their fire, because mission rations were, quite frankly, the worst. Now Shisui took great joy in wandering around the ANBU base casually eating the 'cursed bread' much to the horror of his comrades, and Tenzou occasionally stopped by Kakashi's apartment to pick out a loaf or some rolls from Kakashi's latest batch.

Kakashi's windowsill had gained two more pictures. He'd found a picture of Kushina jokingly stealing Minato's Hokage hat in a cardboard box buried in the back of his closet. The other picture had required a trip to the house that Kakashi technically owned but hadn't set foot in in years. It was a picture from his parents' wedding. His father looked much younger than he did in Kakashi's memories, but it had felt like the right one to pick. After all, his mother and father were together now.

Kakashi only visited the Memorial Stone once a week these days, and even then it was only to leave flowers. He didn't linger any more. Talking to names carved in a stone had finally lost its appeal. He'd rather remember his friends and family alive and smiling than as cold bodies on the ground.

Somedays, Kakashi could look at himself in the mirror and almost believe that Rin's death truly hadn't been his fault. He still wasn't sure if he'd ever be able to forgive her for using _him_ to commit suicide, though. It was a work in progress.

There was also a glass jam jar full of river rocks on Kakashi's windowsill and a box of childish drawings and notes carefully saved in a drawer of Kakashi's side table. Kakashi thought that he was just about ready to introduce himself to Naruto properly. And he thought he could probably even manage it without blurting out "You look so much like your parents" at any point in the conversation and bringing the wrath of the Sandaime down on his head. He was planning to do it the next time he was out on medical leave and had a guaranteed stretch of time in the village.

And given that he was currently stumbling back into Konoha at midnight, unsteady on his feet due to a combination of blood loss, chakra exhaustion, and at least three broken ribs, that probably meant that he'd be able to talk to Naruto in the next couple of days. Kakashi wondered if Iruka would be willing to pick up some books from the library for him. Iruka was generally amenable to that sort of thing if he didn't have a mountain of tests to mark.

Kakashi staggered into the ANBU base, hoping to properly bandage the wound in his thigh before reporting to the Hokage. The Sandaime got really _tetchy_ about people dripping blood on his floor when it wasn't an emergency. He was not expecting the base to be in chaos. Chaos by ANBU standards anyway, so it was a very efficient chaos with lots of people running around and a great deal of soft, panicky gossiping.

"Senpai? Oh, thank gods, no one was sure if you were out on a mission or if he'd gone after _all_ the sharingan users – not just the Uchiha." Tenzou skidded to a halt in front of Kakashi, cat mask still on his belt and eyes as wide with tightly controlled panic as Kakashi had ever seen them.

"Just got back from a mission. What _happened_?"

Tenzou's expression was grim.

"Itachi went rogue. He murdered everyone in his clan except his younger brother."

"Even-" Kakashi couldn't quite bring himself to say Shisui's name. All he could think about was the last time he'd seen Shisui before he'd left on his mission. Shisui had had his feet propped up on a table and had been cheerfully munching on a piece of toast and jam while Badger had been shouting at him to 'stop eating cursed food and tempting fate!'

Tenzou simply nodded.

"How did no one see this coming?" demanded Sparrow coming to a stop next to them. "At the very least, _you_ should have, Hound! You _trained him_ after all."

A wide, gaping chasm of darkness seemed to stretch open beneath Kakashi's feet.

"Don't be ridiculous!" snapped Tenzou fiercely.

"Maybe that was the problem," Sparrow snarled, her voice unnaturally high and tinged with hysteria, and Kakashi remembered that she had been a part of Itachi's squad. "After all, who better to train a clan killer than _Friend-Killer Kakashi_ -"

Kakashi caught Tenzou's fist before it connected with the side of Sparrow's head. His voice was flat and cold when he spoke,

"Sparrow, if you're too emotional to think rationally, then take yourself off duty. If not, then I'm sure you have orders you should be getting to."

Sparrow took one step back, then another.

"Y- yes, Captain." Then she bolted.

"Ignore her, Captain," Tenzou told him quietly as Kakashi let go of his fist. "She's not thinking clearly."

Kakashi just nodded. Logically, he knew that Sparrow was just lashing out at the first convenient target in her shock and pain – just trying to find someone else to blame aside from herself, but-

 _Friend-Killer Kakashi._

Kakashi had thought that he'd finally put that wretched nickname behind him years ago.

The darkness yawned massive and hungry below him, threatening to swallow him whole.

 _Was this how you felt, Dad? Just a little?_

Maybe once Kakashi would have taken the blame as his due – simply another failing to add to his already long list and heavy load – back when he spent every free moment at the Memorial Stone drowning in ghosts. But now-

Kakashi had been a shinobi since he was five years old – a chuunin at six, a jounin at thirteen, an ANBU at fourteen. For seventeen years he'd given himself wholly and unquestioningly to his village. He'd done and seen enough to fuel three lifetimes worth of nightmares. And he was done. Kakashi had wallowed in death and darkness long enough. He was finally ready to step back out into the sun.

* * *

It took a full twenty-four hours before Kakashi was able to give his report to the Hokage. Kakashi's mission had been a success, after all, and was far less pressing than dealing with the fallout of the Uchiha going from close to a hundred strong to just one living member, who was only eight years old and thoroughly traumatized. (Nobody was willing to think of Itachi as a member of the Uchiha clan at the moment.) There was also the fact that Konoha no longer had a police force – no small issue all by itself.

Kakashi took his week and a half of medical leave to look into his finances, plan, and learn how to make an eight-strand braided loaf. (He could do three- and four-strand braided loaves no problem, but eight was _hard_.) He also spent some quality time talking over his decision with his windowsill pictures.

By the time his leave was up, everything was in place, and Kakashi went to the trouble of making a formal appointment with the Hokage.

The Sandaime looked resigned but not surprised when Kakashi set his ANBU mask on his desk and handed over the scroll containing his resignation.

"I'll admit," the Sandaime sighed, "I was rather selfishly hoping to keep you in ANBU a bit longer. You're my best captain, but after eight years, it probably is time for you to return to being a jounin-"

"You misunderstand, Hokage-sama." Kakashi took a deep breath, steeling his resolve. "I want to retire entirely."

 _That_ caught the Sandaime off guard.

"You're only twenty-two and one of the strongest shinobi in the village. You cannot simply _retire_."

"I've been a shinobi since I was five. I may be very good at being a shinobi, but… I would like to learn how to be a _person_ while I still have a chance." Kakashi had been practicing this little speech in front of his windowsill pictures for the last three days. He hoped it sounded as convincing in the Sandaime's office as it had in his kitchen.

The Sandaime sat back in his chair and stared at Kakashi for an uncomfortably long moment, his expression unreadable.

"I can't let you retire," the Sandaime held up a hand, forestalling Kakashi's protest, "but I can take you off active duty and make you part of the reserves. You'll be expected to keep up with your training, and in the event of a serious threat to the village, you _will_ be reactivated. Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, you will be a civilian unless you choose to return to active duty."

Kakashi bowed deeply, relief loosening the tightness in his chest.

"Thank you, Hokage-sama."

The Sandaime picked up his pipe and sucked in a deep lungful of tobacco.

"So do you have a plan for what you're going to do next?" he asked after blowing out a cloud of blue smoke.

Kakashi smiled, the most honest, relaxed expression he'd managed since Rin's death, and waited for the Sandaime to take another pull on his pipe before answering,

"Well, a friend of mine keeps suggesting I open a bakery, so I thought I'd do that."

There was something vaguely satisfying about watching the God of Shinobi nearly choke to death on his own pipe.

* * *

Naruto woke up to the sun in his face. That was the nice thing about Saturdays – no alarm clock because no class. Naruto stretched and then rolled onto his side to check his bedside table to see if Dog-san had stopped by the night before. He had, but instead of the usual pork bun, there was a small origami dog standing on top of a slip of paper with an address written on it.

Naruto blinked at the address. Why would Dog-san have left him an address? Did he need Naruto's help for a mission? Naruto was going to be Hokage one day, but he wasn't sure how much help he'd be on an ANBU mission just yet. Did this- Did this mean that Dog-san wanted to _meet_ him?

Naruto had never gotten dressed so fast in his entire life. He didn't even bother with breakfast before bolting out of his apartment with the address clenched in his hand. It took him to a bakery that Naruto was just about certain hadn't been there a couple of weeks ago. A freshly painted, blue and white sign declared it the Ryouken Bakery.

Naruto hesitated outside the front doors. It certainly didn't _look_ like a front for some sort of ANBU mission, but then it wouldn't, would it? In fact, it just looked like a civilian business. Naruto bit his lip. Civilians sometimes got… unpleasant when he went into their shops. But Dog-san had all but _asked_ him to come here, and his friend had never asked him for anything before. What if Dog-san really did need his help?

Naruto squared his shoulders with renewed determination and pushed open the doors. Overhead, a bell jingled. It looked like a regular bakery on the inside, too. Shelves stacked with bread lined the walls, and a counter with nobody behind it stood in front of a curtained doorway that presumably lead to a back room.

Before Naruto had time to wonder why Dog-san had asked him to come to a deserted bakery, a man stepped through the curtain. He was wearing a plain beige apron, a white, short-sleeved shirt trimmed with dark blue triangles, an equally dark blue, cloth mask that stretched from the collar of his shirt to the bridge of his nose, and a black eyepatch that covered his scarred left eye, but Naruto recognized him. Recognized the height and the build and the unruly silver hair that had always peeked out from beneath the hood of Dog-san's coat the handful of times he had caught a glimpse of his friend patrolling in the village.

"Hello Naruto-kun," the man smiled. Then he reached behind the counter and held out a very familiar roll. "Pork bun? You look like you missed breakfast."

Naruto _beamed_ , wide and honest and brighter than the sun.

* * *

 _A/N: Every time I turn around, it seems another chapter of this story has written itself, so yeah, there will be at least four chapters - a very good chance of five. :)_


	4. Chapter 4

The Ryouken Bakery was one of Naruto's favorite places in Konoha – rivalled only by Ichiraku's. He ended up there almost every day after class, and Kakashi, the owner, was the _coolest_. He used to be an _ANBU captain_ , which Naruto only knew because he'd technically known Kakashi since before he'd retired from ANBU. Naruto would sit on a counter in the back kitchen and do his homework and talk about class while Kakashi made bread in all shapes and sizes and one of Kakashi's shadow clones minded the shop. Kakashi would help him when his homework got confusing. Sometimes after the bakery was closed for the evening, they went over to one of the training fields, and Kakashi would help him with his taijutsu and shuuriken aim. With his friend's help, Naruto's grades had slowly improved until he was mid-ranked in his class instead of hopelessly dead last.

Naruto had never had a big brother before, but… he thought that this was what it was supposed to be like.

* * *

Kakashi had been expecting to catch a fair amount of flak for basically quitting to become a baker, and there definitely had been some. The Council had had conniptions. Some of his fellow shinobi and a number of civilians had expressed their distain about him switching to the reserves at such a young age. The surprising part had been just how _supportive_ a large number of people were. Gai had actually cried joyful tears on him despite Kakashi's best attempts to get away. (They still sparred at least twice a week when Gai was in the village, and Gai still considered Kakashi his rival whether he was semi-retired or not, because apparently taking care of his mental health just made him an even more worthy opponent. Kakashi didn't even bother trying to understand.) Iruka had been surprised when he'd first told him and then just shook his head and sighed, "I really should have expected that," with a smile. Then he'd helped Kakashi put up his new shelves.

Most of Kakashi's regular customers were shinobi. The Akimichi clan had a standing weekly order as did the Inuzuka clan. There were even a handful of ANBU who occasionally stopped in after their patrols and made purchases using hand code before heading back to their ANBU base quarters. (They were generally referred to him by Tenzou, who had taken over leaving 'cursed bread' around the ANBU base and spreading the rumor of the vengeful baker's spirit with unexpected zeal. Apparently Tenzou had developed a taste for pranking his comrades. It was an unexpected turn of events, but Kakashi thoroughly approved.) Civilians wandered in and out – some more than others. Kakashi's bakery was developing a reputation for quality.

Kakashi couldn't remember ever feeling this content before in his entire life. Part of him missed the adrenaline and challenge of missions, but he didn't miss the killing, didn't miss the blood coating his hands. And even if he _had_ missed it, it was all worth it just to hear Naruto's enthusiastic greeting every day when he arrived after the Academy let out.

If the Sandaime and the Council would let him, Kakashi would definitely have stolen- er, _adopted_ Naruto by now, because a ten year old living on his own ought to be _illegal_. And he was speaking from experience. His sensei's son was far too good for this ungrateful village, and Kakashi's customers had quickly learned that any unkind remarks they made directed at Naruto would get them kicked out of the bakery with extreme prejudice. And if the customer in question was a shinobi, the kicking would be very literal. No one could throw somebody out a door quite like a wrathful ex-ANBU captain. Kakashi didn't care what anyone said about _him_ , but Naruto was out of bounds.

The bell over the bakery door jingled, and Kakashi glanced up from the book he was reading. He was out front for once while his shadow clone minded the ovens.

"Really, kid? A bakery?" Jiraiya stepped through the door. "When both your entry and Hound's disappeared from Kiri's Bingo Book, I thought you had been killed in action."

Kakashi closed his book with a decisive snap.

"Not dead – just not on active duty anymore."

Jiraiya's eyebrows shot up.

"You switched to the _reserves_?!"

"Yes," Kakashi told him coolly. "Two years ago now. Which you'd know if you stopped in Konoha more than once a decade." A bit of an exaggeration, but Jiraiya wasn't exactly Kakashi's favorite person at the moment.

Jiraiya either missed his dangerous tone or chose to ignore it.

"You're not even thirty, yet! That's way too young to be on the reserves! You have a duty to Konoha. What would Minato say?!"

And that was a low blow even for Jiraiya. If Kakashi hadn't had a vested interest in his bakery not becoming a smoking crater in the ground, he probably would have been tempted to go after Jiraiya with a chidori or, at the very least, pulled some kunai out of the weapons pouch he had never stopped wearing. Instead he stood up from his stool and leaned his hands on the counter, _radiating_ killing intent.

"I think he'd say, 'Why is my ten year old son living in an apartment by himself, sensei, instead of with his _godfather?_ '"

Jiraiya flinched slightly.

"I'm Konoha's spymaster. I couldn't take a little kid on the road with me – it wouldn't be safe!"

"He doesn't even know your _name_ ," Kakashi snapped. "Couldn't pick you out of a line up if he _tried_. Even if you couldn't take him in, you could have stopped by the village every once in a while and at least _talked_ to him! That would have been enough!" He could tell that his words had made a palpable hit. "You were the only person the Sandaime's orders didn't apply to, and you're a _seals master_. Nobody would have questioned you spending time with the village's jinchuuriki. It wouldn't even have been the first time you had taken in war orphans! You were just too much of a _coward_ to take any responsibility."

Jiraiya glared at him.

"I wouldn't go throwing stones in glass houses if I were you, Hatake."

Kakashi glared right back.

"I was a suicidal, fourteen year old ANBU operative with orders from my Hokage not to approach Naruto until he was at least four years old so no one would suspect that he was really Minato-sensei's son. Besides," the door bell jingled, and Kakashi quickly slammed a lid on his killing intent, "I haven't been in a glass house in a while."

"Hey nii-san!" Naruto called cheerfully, peering around Jiraiya. Kakashi's heart still sort of melted every time Naruto called him that. "Who's the old geezer?"

Kakashi raised a challenging eyebrow at Jiraiya. Jiraiya turned to look at Naruto. His expression was wistful and pained, but his mouth remained firmly shut.

"Nobody," Kakashi finally said, staring Jiraiya straight in the eye. Jiraiya looked away. "Just a customer. Come on, Naruto, I'm closing up early today. We can head over to Training Field 3 and do some taijutsu practice." Kakashi really needed to get out into the fresh air to clear his head a bit.

"Training before homework? Yeah!" Naruto cheered.

"Could you go in the back and tell the shadow clone that he can disperse after he's taken the last batch of bread out of the oven? I'm just going to finish helping this man."

"Sure thing!" Naruto darted through the curtain into the back.

Kakashi turned back to Jiraiya.

"Is there anything else I can help you with?" he asked levelly.

Jiraiya's shoulders slumped a little, and he sighed.

"No. Take care of yourself, kid. And… take care of him, too." Jiraiya turned and left in a rustle of coat, and Kakashi had to squash the urge to shout at him some more. At this point, it wouldn't help anything. If Jiraiya was still too lost in his own grief to act like a godfather, nothing Kakashi could say would change his mind.

* * *

Kakashi never used to have the patience for teaching people things. When he was younger he honestly hadn't understood why people didn't just get it the first time they were told. He didn't know how to break explanations down into smaller pieces or approach concepts from different angles, because he'd never _needed_ to. Baking had taught Kakashi a lot about how to not be instantly good at things, which meant that Kakashi was much better at helping Naruto than he might otherwise have been. Naruto took more after Kushina, who had been a brilliant and gifted kunoichi but not a prodigy. But being a prodigy wasn't always a good thing as Kakashi could personally attest. What Naruto didn't possess in natural talent he made up for with grim determination and tenacity.

Kakashi ruffled Naruto's hair when he finished the kata they'd been working on without any hesitations for the third time in a row.

"Good work." Naruto beamed. "Let's head back to my apartment and get some supper."

Naruto's eyes widened.

"Your apartment? Really?" He'd never been to Kakashi's apartment before. Kakashi nodded. Naruto grinned but then frowned. "Iruka-sensei told me that any time you use your kitchen for something that isn't bread related you set it on fire."

"That's a gross exaggeration. What Iruka-sensei actually meant to say is that you should always leave jam making to the professionals." Kakashi had nearly lost an eyebrow to that little incident and had had his hot water cut off for three days for the scorch marks it had left on his kitchen ceiling. Long story short, the next time some hopeful ANBU tried to special order jam-filled doughnuts, Kakashi was charging double and getting pre-made jam. Naruto didn't need to know that though. "Besides, I was thinking we could get takeout."

"Let's get ramen!"

Kakashi wasn't even remotely surprised. He had absolutely no doubt that Naruto was going to grow up to beat Kushina's record of twenty-eight bowls of ramen in one sitting. At ten, he could already manage _five_. Kakashi was pretty sure that it was some sort of Uzumaki kekkei genkai.

* * *

Naruto started rubbernecking the instant Kakashi opened his apartment door. He looked like he was trying to memorize every detail at once in case he didn't get another chance.

"Put your bag on the table, and then I'll show you where I keep the chopsticks," Kakashi told him as they toed off their shoes by the door.

Naruto bounded into the living room, depositing his takeout bag on the table and spinning in a circle to get a better look at everything. Kakashi shook his head with a smile, put his own bags down, and then headed into the kitchen with Naruto following close on his heels.

Kakashi was digging through a drawer in search of two pairs of matching chopsticks (how? How did he have so many chopsticks that _didn't match_?!) when Naruto piped up,

"Hey, Kakashi-nii, is that your gennin team?"

Kakashi straightened up to find Naruto pointing at his old team photo.

"More or less, though we were all chuunin when that was taken."

"You were so _short_!" Naruto laughed. "And-" He paused, squinted more closely at the picture, and then screeched at an ear-bleedingly loud volume, "OH MY GOSH, YOU WERE TAUGHT BY THE _YONDAIME?!_ "

Kakashi waited until the ringing in his ears had subsided before responding. It was okay – he probably hadn't needed that eardrum anyway.

"Technically Minato-sensei was still just a jounin when he taught me, but yes."

"That's _so. Awesome._ " Naruto was up on tiptoe trying to get a better look at the picture. "He's my hero! What was it like to be taught by him? What was _he_ like?" he asked eagerly.

Kakashi blinked. The Sandaime had forbidden him from telling Naruto about his parents, but he'd never said _anything_ about not regaling Naruto with stories about Kakashi's chuunin team and their sensei and their sensei's girlfriend. Hel- _lo_ loophole. All he had to do was not mention Kushina's last name or the fact that she was a jinchuuriki, and he was home free.

"Come on," Kakashi grabbed his team photo and Kushina's picture off the windowsill and then pulled four chopsticks out of his drawer at random – they ought to work well enough whether they matched or not. "I'll tell you all about him over supper."

Naruto's eyes practically glowed with excitement. He dashed back out to the table and sat down so quickly that his chair slid a few inches across the floor sideways.

"Looks like we're having a family dinner, sensei," Kakashi murmured quietly, and then followed after Naruto at a slightly more sedate pace. The pictures were set in a place of honor in the center of the table. Once they both had a takeout container of ramen in front of them, Kakashi started, "You can't really talk about Minato-sensei without also talking about Kushina, the Red Hot-Blooded Habanero. They were together pretty much the entire time I knew Minato-sensei-"

Kakashi had never seen Naruto pay so little attention to a bowl of ramen. Over the next two hours, Kakashi talked himself practically hoarse. It barely even scratched the surface of everything he wanted to tell Naruto about his parents, but that was all right. It was a start, and he had time.

* * *

 _A/N:_ _If Jiraiya had been around for when Kakashi was still in ANBU, he would have been part of the pro-bakery camp, but he missed all that and I think that this was also a fair amount of his own guilt talking._

 _Since I forgot to mention it last chapter, "Ryouken" means hound or hunting dog in Japanese (unless Google has been lying to me again). Kakashi decided that calling his bakery anything scarecrow related would sound weird._


	5. Chapter 5

"KAKASHI HATAKE!" Kakashi looked up from his book as the bakery door slammed open to reveal a furious Academy teacher. "What were you _thinking_ teaching a twelve year old DANGEROUS FORBIDDEN JUTSUS?!"

"Maaa, it was just the one forbidden jutsu," Kakashi shrugged unrepentantly. "And I was thinking that Naruto has _so much_ chakra that it will probably take another couple years of chakra control exercises before he has the finesse to successfully create a basic buunshin." Kakashi didn't mention that he remembered basic buunshin giving Kushina similar problems even as an adult. He wasn't sure if it was an Uzumaki-ludicrous-chakra thing, a jinchuuriki thing, or a combination of the two.

"You do realize that Kage Buunshin no jutsu would _kill_ any of Naruto's classmates if they tried it, right? Most shinobi don't have the chakra to do it safely until they're chuunin," Iruka sighed.

"Which is why I have impressed upon Naruto that he isn't allowed to teach it to any of his teammates until they _all_ pass the chuunin exams." Kakashi slid his book under the shop counter. "I take it from your yelling that Naruto passed? You must have run pretty fast to beat him across town."

"He's actually waiting outside. I asked him to wait so that I could yell at you properly before we went out for celebratory ramen." Iruka turned and shouted over his shoulder, "Okay, Naruto – I'm done!"

"NII-SAN!" Kakashi walked around the counter and an excited blur of orange slammed into his side with enough force to knock a less well-trained person off their feet. "I _PASSED_! I'M A GENIN!"

"Congratulations, Naruto." Kakashi ruffled his hair, and Naruto's smile was radiant. His ever present goggles had been replaced with a brand new hitai-ate. "I never doubted that you would."

* * *

There was always about a week between the Academy graduation exam and genin team assignments. The paperwork only took about a day. The rest of the time was needed to track down the various potential jounin senseis and pry them out of the places they'd hidden themselves when they'd been told that they were being forced to work with children.

Because of this, Naruto was at the bakery with Kakashi helping knead dough when the hawk arrived.

"He's _stalking_ me!" Naruto was grumbling. "I mean, I'm kind of flattered, but I don't care if he _is_ Hokage-jiji's grandson, that's still no excuse for acting like a complete and utter _brat_ – believe it!"

The still familiar triple tap of a beak on glass caught Kakashi's attention immediately, and he felt his heart sink as soon as he spotted the messenger hawk outside the window. He froze for the barest fraction of a second before wiping his hands on his apron and going to open the window. The hawk didn't wait for a response and took off again as soon as Kakashi had relieved it of its scroll.

A summons from the Hokage. In all likelihood, he was being reactivated but-

Kakashi had been keeping an ear to the ground and up to date on the latest ANBU gossip. Even Tenzou agreed that things had been quiet the last few years. Suna was too broke to start any trouble. Kiri seemed to be busy trying to become the first hidden village to implode and spectacularly self-destruct. Iwa was still rebuilding after the last war. And Kumo was always a potential threat, but the Raikage hadn't tried anything significant since he had failed to kidnap the Hyuuga clan's heiress. Everything had been quiet… unless one of their enemies had simply been biding their time.

Please. Please, not another war. Naruto had _just_ graduated.

"Something wrong?" asked Naruto, pausing to frown at the scroll in Kakashi's hands.

"The Hokage just wants to talk to me," Kakashi told him with a smile that was more forced than normal. He stripped off his apron and wondered absently how much flour was too much flour to be wearing when he saw the Hokage. He didn't have time to go home and change. Maybe he should put a light henge on his clothes? "Would you mind watching the shop for me? I don't think I should be too long."

"All by myself?"

"Well, you _are_ a genin these days." Kakashi tapped the metal plate of Naruto's hitai-ate, and Naruto grinned at the reminder. "Think of it as a practice D-rank mission."

"Yeah! I can do that!"

Kakashi didn't bother with a henge. If the Sandaime hadn't wanted him to show up in his office covered in flour, he should have given him more notice.

The brand new jounin vest folded neatly on the Sandaime's desk confirmed Kakashi's suspicions. He was being reactivated.

"You asked to see me, Hokage-sama?"

"Yes." The Sandaime pushed the jounin vest towards Kakashi, but Kakashi kept his hands folded behind his back. "The Council has decided that it's time for you to return to active duty."

Kakashi let out a soft, resigned sigh.

"Who opened hostilities? Kumo? Kiri?"

"Nothing of the sort. As you know, the Academy graduation exams finished yesterday." Kakashi nodded. "Sasuke Uchiha was among the students who passed."

"So you want me to go after Itachi?" Kakashi asked blankly. He supposed he could see the logic in that – the best opponent to send against a sharingan user _was_ another sharingan user – but five years seemed like an _awfully_ long time to wait to deal with the Itachi problem.

"No, I want you to teach Sasuke."

There was a moment of perfect, dead silence.

"You want me," Kakashi repeated, "to teach Sasuke Uchiha. Forgive me, Hokage-sama, but I believe your exact words were 'in the event of a serious threat to the village,' and I don't understand how one maladjusted twelve year old constitutes a serious threat to the village."

The Sandaime sighed.

"Kakashi, you're the only person left in Konoha with any understanding of how the sharingan works. Sasuke is going to need your help when he awakens his clan's gekkei genkai."

"If," Kakashi corrected. "There were plenty of Uchiha who never did. Sasuke might end up being one of them. And who knows when he will even if he does. I could just tutor him when that happens. I'm really not a good choice to be a jounin sensei."

The Sandaime raised an eyebrow.

"If ever there was an ideal role model for a young man, who has lost everything and is subsequently drowning himself in darkness because he doesn't know a better way, I think it would be you." Kakashi looked away. That comment had hit a little too close to home. "Also," the Sandaime continued, "if you agree to this, I'll put Naruto on your team as well."

 _That_ got Kakashi's attention.

"Sasuke graduated Rookie of the Year, didn't he? The top two students always get paired with the class's dead-last, and Naruto is a solidly mid-ranked student."

"True," the Sandaime gave a small shrug and puffed on his pipe, "but I've always thought that that was a bit of a nonsensical tradition. I think it's time for a change. Don't you?"

It was blatant emotional manipulation, and the really annoying thing was that it was _working_.

"Fine. I'll do it if you finally put through that special dispensation so that I can tell Naruto that he's a jinchuuriki. He's a genin now and an adult in the eyes of the village – he has a _right_ to know."

"Done," the Sandaime nodded. "Stop by the Mission Room tomorrow to pick up the files for your new team and fill out some paperwork."

Kakashi finally picked up his new jounin vest. He'd have to do some shopping – the last time he'd worn a full set of proper shinobi blues, he'd still been growing.

"Yes, Hokage-sama," Kakashi bowed. And – because he was back on active duty now, wasn't he? – he left out of the Sandaime's window instead of the door.

Holy hell, he'd just agreed to be a jounin sensei.

What had he been _thinking_?!

* * *

Once the bakery was closed for the day and Naruto had headed home with an invitation to dinner the next night (because the Council was made up of assholes like Danzo who had been blocking Kakashi's requests for permission to tell Naruto that he was a jinchuuriki for the past _year_ and he wasn't going to risk saying anything until he had that signed dispensation in his _hand_ ), Kakashi didn't even bother going home. Instead he walked right past his apartment, down the hall, and started pounding frantically on the door of 3A, new jounin vest still clenched in one hand. It took a full thirty seconds for Iruka to yank open the door, which was twenty-eight seconds too long in Kakashi's opinion. Before Iruka could do more than glare at him, he blurted out,

"How the _hell_ do I _teach children_?!"

Iruka's face went blank, and his gaze shifted from Kakashi's frantic expression to the vest clutched in his fist.

"They tapped _you_ to be a jounin sensei?" There was a touch of disbelief in his voice.

"I know. It's a terrible idea, but the Sandaime is a master of emotional blackmail, and I said yes. Now, how the hell do I teach? I have no clue what I'm doing. I was generally too busy fighting with Obito to pay attention to how Minato-sensei handled things, and Naruto has heard the bell test story at least five times, so there's no way they're not going to pass."

"Kakashi… you've been basically tutoring Naruto for nearly five years now," Iruka told him patiently. "What did you think you were doing if not _teaching_ him?"

"Uh…."

Iruka rolled his eyes.

"Come on. I'll make curry, you can sit at the table not touching anything, and we can discuss the fundamentals of teaching children armed with edged weapons."

"Hey," Kakashi protested as he followed Iruka into his apartment, "I'm not _that_ bad at cooking!"

"If it isn't something you can cook over a campfire or a recipe you've tried at _least_ three times, you're a menace. Now go sit down and don't. Touch. _Anything_."

* * *

The special dispensation sat like a brick in Kakashi's pocket as he and Naruto ate supper the next night. How the hell did he start this conversation?

"It's so cool that you're going to be going on missions again," Naruto was babbling, a certain amount of anxiety hidden underneath the cheer. "Do you know who your team is going to be, yet?"

"Yup, but I can't tell you."

"Aw! Why not?"

"It's in case there have to be any last minute team changes. Nothing is actually _officially_ official until team assignments are announced." Kakashi would be more frustrated about that rule if he wasn't also looking forward to the look of surprise on Naruto's face when he found out who his team's jounin sensei was.

Naruto pouted.

"That's really annoying."

Kakashi just shrugged and chewed thoughtfully on a slightly overdone slice of beef. Damn it, he just couldn't think of a way of easing into this. Might as well go with the old standby of full frontal assault.

Kakashi pulled the scroll containing the special dispensation out of his pocket and set it down on the table with a _thunk_.

"What's that?" asked Naruto around a mouthful of rice.

"Signed permission from the Hokage so that I can finally have a conversation with you that I've been wanting to have for a while."

Before Kakashi could continue, Naruto interrupted eagerly,

"Is it about when you were in ANBU?"

"No-"

"This isn't going to be like the puberty conversation, is it?" Naruto interrupted again, eyes narrowing suspiciously.

"Thank gods, _no_ ," Kakashi groaned. He was actively trying to repress the memories of that particular talk. "Hold on – I need help for this." He got up and retrieved Kushina's picture from the kitchen. Naruto eyed it curiously as Kakashi set it in the center of the table. "I know that I've told you what an amazing person and kunoichi Kushina was-"

"Yeah! Her chakra chains sound like they were so _cool_! I wish I could have seen them."

Kakashi just barely managed to bite back the words 'I wish you could have, too,' because at this rate it was probably going to take a _new Hokage_ getting elected before somebody finally let him tell Naruto who his parents were. (He was secretly hoping that if he dropped enough hints, Naruto would figure it out for himself. So far no luck.)

"Well, there was another thing that made her amazing that I haven't been able to tell you about, because it's an S-Class secret." Kakashi took a breath before continuing. "Kushina was the jinchuuriki of the Kyuubi no Kitsune. She kept the entire village safe by keeping the Kyuubi sealed inside of her chakra, so it couldn't hurt anybody."

"You mean the demon fox that attacked the village?" Naruto's eyes were wide.

Kakashi nodded.

"The night of the attack Kushina's seal was in a weakened state." Kakashi reached out a hand and traced a finger over Kushina's smiling image. "Something happened – I don't know what – but the Kyuubi was ripped out of her. She and Minato-sensei fought to the last to try to stop the Kyuubi, but in the end, the only way sensei could stop the Kyuubi was by giving his life to seal it inside a new born baby, who then took on Kushina's legacy of protecting Konoha from the demon fox."

Naruto's eyes were saucers and shiny with unshed tears. Kakashi could almost see the pieces fixing together in his head.

"You mean… the- the Yondaime sealed the Kyuubi in… me?" he whispered.

"Yes."

"So I killed the Yondaime?"

" _No_. Sensei chose to sacrifice himself to save everyone in the village. It was _his_ choice. He wanted people to see you as a hero for the burden he put on your shoulders." Kakashi still wasn't very good at hugs, but Naruto really looked like he needed one, so he tried his best anyway. Naruto snuffled into Kakashi's shirt.

"Is that why people don't like me?" he finally asked.

"People are stupid," Kakashi grumbled. "The Sandaime made it illegal for anyone to talk about the Kyuubi, because he wanted you to have as normal a childhood as possible, but I think that just confused people and made things worse."

Naruto was quiet for a long time, face still buried in Kakashi's shirt. Then he sat up, wiping his nose on his sleeve, and stared at where Kushina's picture stood smiling in the middle of the table.

"Were people mean to her, too?"

"Some. If people got too rude, though, she generally started throwing punches, and not many people knew that she was a jinchuuriki."

"She must have been really brave," Naruto finally concluded.

"Yeah. Yeah, she was."

"So since Kushina had the Kyuubi in her before and I have the Kyuubi in me now, do you think that means that I have some of Kushina inside of me, too?"

"Yeah, Naruto, I'd definitely say that you do." And Kakashi wasn't sure whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

"Then I'm going to keep on protecting the village just like she did – believe it! And when I become Hokage, I'm going to get rid of that law, because not talking about important things never helped anybody!"

Kakashi ruffled Naruto's hair, because he'd run out of words.

Gods above, this kid.

* * *

Kakashi stared at his reflection in his bathroom mirror. Wearing a hitai-ate instead of an eyepatch again felt weird and only left him with a small triangle of face. He already missed having two visible eyebrows. Oh, well – he'd get used to it again.

He ran a hand through his hair. What was it Obito used to occasionally call him? Oh, yeah – paintbrush head. Not entirely inaccurate.

Kakashi was mostly just wearing a standard jounin uniform, but he'd added an old-fashioned clan sleeve to the right shoulder of his vest. It was white with the red Uzushio whorl and the Hatake clan border of triangles in dark blue instead of the usual crimson. Clan style but still not exactly the same as the one his father had worn. His tanto strap was a familiar weight across his chest. He'd never really worn his tanto when he was in village, but he'd rarely gone on a mission without one since he'd made chuunin. He needed to get used to wearing one for extended periods of time again.

Kakashi glanced over at his stack of team files. Naruto's held exactly no surprises, Sasuke's current address was deeply upsetting and further proof that the village Council was comprised of nothing but _idiots_ , and Kakashi really hoped that Sakura Haruno was better taijutsu in reality than she appeared to be on paper, because otherwise she was going to need a _lot_ of work.

Well, team assignments weren't until that afternoon. Time to head over to the bakery and get started for the day.

* * *

It could have been worse, Sasuke reflected. He could have ended up on a team with Kiba. At least Naruto wasn't a _complete_ idiot. He was obnoxiously _loud_ , but he generally tried to pull his own weight instead of being utterly useless. Sakura, on the other hand, Sasuke would have gladly traded for Kiba. Sasuke hated fawning, and the only person in their class who fawned worse than Sakura was Ino. And Ino at least had Yamanaka clan techniques going for her.

Sasuke didn't have great hopes for the new 'Team 7,' but it didn't really matter. His teammates weren't important – they were just there to help him make chuunin. Just another stepping stone in his quest for vengeance. Connecting with others only made you weak – Sasuke had learned that the hard way. The best he could ask for was useful teammates, who wouldn't slow him down – wouldn't be deadweight.

Speaking of slow, where the _hell_ was their new sensei? Everyone else had left over half an hour ago. Even Iruka-sensei had looked at the clock, pressed a hand to his face, and then told them that he'd be right back before he'd disappeared nearly ten minutes ago. Sasuke was not impressed. His estimation of Team 7's jounin sensei was dropping by the minute. Clearly somebody had been scraping the bottom of the barrel when they'd found this one.

"Hey Sakura-chan," Naruto had looped two kunai over his fingers and was walking them across his desk like a pair of particularly deadly legs, "do you have any idea what you want to specialize in, yet?"

"Oh, uh, I don't know – maybe genjutsu?" Sakura shot Sasuke a sideways glance, checking for his approval. Sasuke continued to ignore her.

The classroom door abruptly slid open with a bit too much force – the result of the person doing the pushing using their foot instead of a hand. The man framed in the doorway was still in the middle of pulling on his jounin vest and-

"NII-SAN!"

Sasuke nearly fell over sideways from the sheer volume of Naruto's shout. Had he mentioned how much he hated how obnoxiously _loud_ Naruto was?

"Maaa, sorry, I'm late-"

Naruto had already leapt over his desk and was standing in front of the man, who was presumably their new sensei, practically vibrating with excitement.

"So you're really going to be our jounin sensei?" Naruto demanded. The man nodded. "That's so awesome! We're going to be the best team _ever_!"

Sasuke stared skeptically at the jounin. He was tall, wore an old-fashioned clan sleeve with an unfamiliar clan pattern, and his shirt, mask, and forearms were liberally smudged with something that looked distinctly like flour. He also had his hitai-ate slanted down over one eye and an apron dangling from his left hand. Sasuke was not impressed.

"Nii-san?" Sakura repeated, her tone colored with confusion and disbelief.

Sasuke scowled fiercely to himself. Another point against their new sensei.

"Well, you've probably spent enough time in this classroom. Meet me on the roof, and we'll do introductions." The jounin eye-smiled and then disappeared in a swirl of leaves.

Naruto was literally bouncing now.

"This is the best!" he crowed.

"How do you know him?" asked Sakura, standing up from her seat and heading for the door.

"Kakashi-nii runs the Ryouken Bakery!" Naruto told her cheerfully. "He got reactivated just to teach us! Isn't that so cool?"

"Reactivated?"

"Oh, yeah – he's been on the reserves for a few years now."

In an unprecedented moment of solidarity, Sakura and Sasuke exchanged a dubious look behind Naruto's back as he raced ahead of them. Most shinobi didn't join the reserves until they were at least forty, and given the color of this Kakashi's hair, he was probably pushing fifty. They'd been saddled with a semi-retired, half-blind, forty-something _baker_. What the HELL had Iruka-sensei, Mizuki-sensei, and the Sandaime been _thinking_?!

Sasuke didn't groan, but his scowl did deepen. It looked like their jounin sensei was going to be even more of a deadweight than Sakura.

Brilliant.

* * *

"So just say a little bit about yourselves. Likes, dislikes, dreams for the future – that sort of thing." Kakashi smiled and ignored Sasuke and Sakura's blatantly doubtful expressions. They'd clearly already jumped to their own unfavorable conclusions about him. Obviously they were going to need some practice looking underneath the underneath, because making assumptions like that in the field was a great way to get yourself killed.

"Why don't you go first, sensei, to show us how it's done?" suggested Sakura, pushing her hair back over one shoulder. Kakashi made a mental note to have a word with her about her hair. Long hair was fine, but wearing it loose like that was a non-verbal boast and flaunt of skills that most shinobi and kunoichi didn't attempt until they made jounin. He wondered if grabbing it during the bell test would be enough to get his point across without excessive conversation.

"All right. My name's Kakashi Hatake. I like making bread, dogs, and romance novels. I dislike sweets and when my oven catches fire. As for dreams for the future," Kakashi considered this for a moment, "I'd really like to perfect making Tea Country croissants."

"Me next!" Naruto adjusted his hitai-ate with one hand, grin bright and sunny. "I'm Naruto Uzumaki! I like ramen and training. I dislike any bread dough that takes more than three hours to rise, because that's just way too long! And my dream is to become Hokage! Believe it!"

Kakashi nodded at him with a fond smile and then turned his attention to Sakura.

"I'm Sakura Haruno. I, um, like-" She glanced sideways at Sasuke and made a strange squeaky noise as her face turned red. "My future dreams-" She did the same glance-squeak-red-face thing again but louder and somehow redder. Then she added fiercely, "And I dislike Ino-pig!"

"O…kay." Her exam notes said she had made a perfect buunshin, Kakashi reminded himself. _Perfect_. And Academy instructors didn't hand out that note lightly. There was potential there – even if it was currently buried under twelve feet of hormones. He turned to his last student.

Sasuke had his hands folded in front of his face, and his eyes were narrowed dangerously. He looked less like a newly minted gennin than a brooding supervillain contemplating his latest world domination plan.

"My name is Sasuke Uchiha. I don't have any likes, and my dislikes are none of your business. As for my dream, it's not so much a dream as a goal – to kill a certain man."

Kakashi resisted the urge to slap a hand against his face, but the words popped out of his mouth before he could stop them,

"Really? Your dream is to murder Itachi? That's a terrible life goal." Kakashi sighed, "Besides, you're going to have to get in line – Shisui was very popular." He didn't mention that ANBU took betrayal even more personally than the average shinobi.

Sasuke's expression was completely gob-smacked for a moment before turning into a glower. Clearly no one had ever questioned his unhealthy quest for vengeance before. This was why you shouldn't let children live by themselves in the house where their parents _got murdered_. At least Kakashi had been moved into his own apartment. Hopefully, Sasuke wasn't so far gone that the kid wouldn't be able to still find the person hiding beneath the pain and vengeance. And hopefully the Sandaime was right and what Sasuke really needed was another option aside from the path he was currently walking.

Gods above, this team was going to need so much work. Then again, often the doughs that took the most time and effort produced the best breads. In the end, the patience and extra effort was always worth it. Maybe that was the best way to think of Team 7.

Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura were still just base ingredients, but there was a glimmer there – a potential that maybe, together, they could be something great.

* * *

 _A/N: You can't be chronically late and run a bakery, but Kakashi did get the time of team assignments completely wrong._


	6. Chapter 6

Naruto was _so excited_. His team was taking the _bell test_! The same one that the Yondaime had given _his_ students. How cool was that?

And the best part was that Naruto already knew part of the secret – it was all about teamwork. Which made sense when you really thought about it – one-on-one, no genin would be able to take on a jounin. So they needed teamwork and strategy and to not get hung up on the actual number of bells. Now he just had to convince Sasuke and Sakura. He hadn't had a chance to tell them what to expect after team introductions yesterday, and Kakashi hadn't been running late that morning.

The question was, who should he try to convince first? Sakura would probably be easier to convince, but she generally always sided with Sasuke about everything. As soon as Sasuke disagreed with Naruto, Sakura would most likely change her mind again. Sasuke would be harder to convince, but once Sasuke went along with Naruto's plan, Sakura would agree on principle.

Damn it, he was going to have to talk to Sasuke-teme first.

Naruto's stomach grumbled. He'd only eaten a small breakfast that morning in an act of team solidarity. He knew that Sakura and Sasuke would have taken Kakashi at his word and not eaten anything.

Naruto kicked his feet thoughtfully for a moment. The branch he was sitting on was high enough up the tree to obscure him in the leaves without blocking his view of Kakashi. Kakashi was currently standing in the middle of the clearing, reading a book about sponge starters. He looked sort of bored.

Naruto made twenty shadow clones that all mobbed Kakashi at once and used the distraction to slither down his tree and head off in the direction he'd last seen Sasuke go. The shadow clones ought to keep Kakashi entertained for a minute or two.

He found Sasuke hiding in a bush, watching with narrow-eyed focus as Kakashi casually fought off Naruto's shadow clones.

"Hey, teme." Naruto settled down next to him. "I've got a plan."

"Dobe, I don't need your help to take on some _baker_. Worry about your own bell."

Naruto gaped, torn between wanting to defend his nii-san's awesomeness and wondering how Sasuke had managed to get Rookie of the Year and still be _this dumb_. He settled for rolling his eyes, because smacking the bastard on the back of the head like he really wanted to would probably shake the entire bush and give away their position.

"Listen, the bells are just-" But Sasuke had already shot out of the bush to launch his attack. "-a distraction." Naruto scowled at Sasuke's back. It was all well and good to know that this was supposed to be a test of teamwork, but it didn't matter if your teammates refused to listen to you.

Naruto watched with a certain amount of satisfaction as Kakashi handed Sasuke his ass without ever glancing up from his book. A well-placed kick sent Sasuke flying out of the clearing. Kakashi turned a page.

Naruto scooted out of the bush just before Sasuke crash-landed back into it. Sasuke's feet ended up sticking up into the air in a very undignified manner.

"Kakashi-nii was in ANBU," Naruto told him in his best unimpressed tone. "Wanna hear my plan now, teme?"

"Hn."

"Right. First we need to find Sakura-chan."

* * *

"The bells are just a distraction?" asked Sakura doubtfully. She twisted a piece of hair around one finger and glanced nervously at Sasuke. Sasuke was always so cool and smart, but even Sakura could admit that the leaves sticking out of his hair detracted from his mystique slightly.

"Well," Naruto hedged, rubbing one cheek, "I mean, not _entirely_ , but the number of bells definitely is. The point is that we're supposed to work _together_ to get them."

"I don't know-"

"Can we just give my plan a try? I spent all night coming up with it – believe it!"

" _Fine_. Let's hear it, dobe," Sasuke finally decided.

Sakura nodded. If Sasuke-kun thought it was all right, then it must be.

"Right! Sasuke and I are going to distract Kakashi-nii while you grab the bells, Sakura-chan!" Naruto beamed.

Sasuke and Sakura stared at him.

"Is that _it_?" asked Sasuke, his tone dripping with condescension.

"Really, Naruto?" Sakura scowled. "You spent all night coming up with _that_?"

"Not _just_ that!" Naruto protested. "Watch this!" He made the same weird seal he'd used at their graduation exam. Five more Narutos appeared in their hiding place, and then two of them henged into Sasuke, and two more turned into Sakura. Sakura felt her face go very hot – she was surrounded by Sasuke-kuns! "Team 7 – army style! That way we can attack head-on, but still have the element of surprise, because he won't know which ones are the real us!"

"Huh." Sakura blinked. "That's not actually entirely stupid."

"Hn." Sasuke stood and walked a circle around the extra Sasukes and Sakuras, scrutinizing them. "Might be worth a try," he finally admitted. "How many of those can you do?"

"A lot, but more than thirty gets excessive if I'm not in a wide open field. I just get in my own way."

Sasuke looked thoughtful, then picked up a stick and started scratching a crude map of the clearing where Kakashi was still reading on a bare patch of ground.

"Make five clones of Sakura and four of me and you. Sakura, you hide in that large tree at the far end of the clearing, and we'll try to herd him towards you."

"That's brilliant, Sasuke-kun!"

"It was my idea in the first place," Naruto grumbled, but Sakura ignored him. Any plan that Sasuke-kun came up with had to succeed! And Inner Sakura really liked the idea of ganging up on their sensei.

This was going to work!

* * *

In the initial confusion of the Team 7 army rushing into the clearing from every direction, Sakura henged herself into a rock at the base of the tree Sasuke had mentioned. She tried to attune her chakra to the natural chakra of the area around her the way Iruka-sensei had described to them in stealth and infiltration class. She did her best to feel the flow of her chakra and mentally smooth its edges into the world around her. _I am stone. I am earth – cool, steady, firm._ She had never tried it before, but it was worth a shot if it made her blend in better. It was hard to stay quiet and focused when Sasuke was fighting right in front of her and looking so _cool_ , but Sakura kept her breathing carefully soft and even.

Kakashi-sensei had finally put his book away, but the "herding" part of the plan wasn't working so well. His feet had barely moved an inch from their original position. At this rate, they'd never get Kakashi-sensei within Sakura's reach before the time was up. Then Sasuke blew a _massive_ fireball at their sensei and Kakashi leapt back-

Landing _right in front of Sakura!_

Her breath caught. This was her chance! She'd have to be quick and pick her moment just right….

Sakura waited until Kakashi's attention appeared to be focused on Naruto, Sasuke, and the two remaining Sakura clones, and then she _lunged_.

Her fingertip _just_ brushed a bell and then-

There was a hand in her hair, pulling her head back, and a kunai at her throat.

* * *

The scream brought Sasuke up short. To his left, Naruto and the two remaining clones froze as well.

Kakashi had Sakura trapped by the hair and was holding a kunai to her neck.

"Put down your weapons and surrender," Kakashi ordered calmly. He wasn't even the slightest bit out of breath, and that irked Sasuke to no end.

Naruto dropped the shuuriken in his hand, and his remaining clones dispersed themselves. Sasuke let the kunai fall out of his hand as well. Great. So much for that plan. Damn it, Sasuke refused to fail this test and get sent back to the Academy all because of Sakura and her stupid hair.

"Well, I have to say-" Kakashi started, turning his head towards Naruto and leaving his left side – and the bells – _wide open_.

Sasuke didn't even think – he sprang forward.

He got _so close_.

Then in a blur of motion that was too fast for his brain to follow, Sasuke found himself lying face first in the dirt with his arm twisted painfully behind his back and a kunai pricking at the base of his skull. Somewhere above him, Kakashi let out a disappointed sigh.

"And you were all doing so _well_. Congratulations, Sasuke-kun – willful endangerment of a teammate's life is an automatic fail. Thanks to your actions, your entire team is going back to the Academy. And when I was just about to pass you, too. Such a shame."

* * *

The ropes bit uncomfortably into Sasuke's arms as he shifted against the post he was tied to. Naruto and Sakura sat gloomily to either side of him. Kakashi had left a few minutes earlier saying that, if Naruto and Sakura could follow orders and not share any of their lunches with him, then he might reconsider sending them back to the Academy with Sasuke.

Sasuke's empty stomach groaned, and he winced.

"To hell with this," Naruto abruptly announced. He pulled a roll out of the paper bag that was sitting next to the two untouched bentos and shoved it in Sasuke's face. "Eat something. If your stomach growls any louder, it might wake the dead."

Sasuke resolutely turned his head away.

"Don't be stupid, dobe. You're throwing away your only chance of not going back to the Academy."

Naruto just moved the roll so that it was in front of Sasuke's face again.

"Like another year at the Academy will kill me." And Naruto's tone was a little strained, a little forced, but he still sounded like he meant every word. "Until somebody tells me otherwise, we're still a team, and I don't let my teammates starve no matter what – believe it!"

Sakura hesitated, then opened one of the bentos and selected a piece of grilled salmon with mismatched chopsticks and held it out towards Sasuke as well.

"Naruto's right. We're a team. And- and even if we only got to be a team for twenty-four hours, I think we were a good one. At least for a little bit there." Her smile was shaky but honest.

Sasuke stared at them.

Connections made you weak. Caring made you weak. Compassion made you weak. Friendship made you weak.

But-

Sasuke's stomach clenched painfully and growled again.

But solitude made you starve to death.

And a tiny part of Sasuke wondered if maybe, just maybe, that was what had happened to Itachi. If, somewhere between the pressures that the Uchiha clan had heaped upon his shoulders and the lonely isolation of his ANBU missions, Itachi's soul had quietly starved to death.

 _Maybe_ , that tiny part whispered so softly that Sasuke couldn't even hear it, yet, _Itachi was wrong about what strength is._

Sasuke looked down and swallowed thickly. He didn't want to say the words. They stuck painfully in his throat and sounded so, _so_ weak in his ears, but they needed to be said.

"I'm… sorry. I shouldn't have- I messed up, and neither of you should be paying for my mistakes." He finally forced himself to look up at Naruto and Sakura. "I'm sorry."

Naruto's eyes were wide with surprise for a moment and then he smiled. It was a smaller, more controlled thing than Naruto's usual smiles, and it somehow made his face look far older than it should.

"And we forgive you." Then the unfamiliar smile was replaced with a much more familiar look of unshakable determination. "Now eat the damn pork bun already, teme."

Sasuke finally gave in and took a bite of the pork bun. It tasted far better than he was expecting it to.

"Congratulations, Team 7." All three of them jumped as Kakashi spoke up from directly behind them. The ropes holding Sasuke in place went slack, and a third bento dropped into his lap. "You pass."

Sasuke stared blankly at the lunch sitting in his lap. Kakashi stepped around from behind them.

"Really?" asked Sakura in disbelief.

Kakashi nodded.

"Naruto, good plan, but do remember that just combining shadow clones and punching doesn't always solve everything. Sakura, that was some excellent stealth you demonstrated – I would barely have noticed your chakra if I hadn't been looking for it – and I expect your hair to either be in a bun or cut short when you arrive for training tomorrow morning. Sasuke, that was an impressive fire jutsu, but if you _ever_ put a mission above the lives of your teammates again, I will personally kick you back to the Academy, because you won't deserve to be a shinobi. That goes for all of you, understand? Those who break the rules are trash, but those who abandon their comrades are worse than trash."

"Yes, sensei," chorused the newly minted and still rather shell-shocked Team 7.

"Excellent! Meet me at the Ryouken Bakery at 6am tomorrow morning. Until then, you have the rest of the day off. Enjoy your lunches – and please don't lose my chopsticks."

* * *

 _A/N: It was Sasuke acknowledging and apologizing for his mistakes that caused Team 7 to pass in this universe - not the sharing of food despite orders._


	7. Chapter 7

Kakashi hadn't expected to actually _enjoy_ being a jounin sensei – and he didn't always – but overall, yeah, it was sort of fun.

Naruto had thrown himself into D-ranks with a surprising amount of enthusiasm. His chakra control was slowly improving the more he practiced tree walking. It was too early to say for sure, but Kakashi thought that there was a good chance that Naruto might end up being team lead when the three of them made chuunin.

Sakura had gotten tree walking down on her first try and mastered water walking in less than forty-eight hours, so now Kakashi had her working on endurance training while the boys worked on their chakra control. He was also teaching her how to pick locks using chakra and dismantle basic security seals, because that girl had the makings of an infiltration _expert_.

After his apology during the bell test, Sasuke seemed to be a little less quick to dismiss his teammates out of hand. Kakashi was under no illusions that the kid had dropped his vengeance quest, but he was viewing his teammates as people instead of tools, and that was a good start.

Their teamwork was improving as well. It was odd. Naruto would generally come up with a basic plan, Sasuke would add some much needed detail, and more recently Sakura had started pointing out flaws and suggesting alternative options. The system seemed to work well for them so far.

Naruto had also sort of become team spokesperson.

"Could you please explain to me," the Sandaime sighed long-sufferingly, "how you managed to change your D-rank mission to help organize files at the Academy into a B-rank suspect apprehension?"

"It was all Sakura-chan!" Naruto announced proudly. "She's the one who noticed the code in Mizuki-sensei's files!"

"It wasn't a very complicated code." Sakura shuffled her feet, looking a little embarrassed. "And he'd left the files right there on his desk." She pushed a few strands of hair that had come loose from her bun behind her ear. It was one of her more obvious tells that she was lying. Kakashi had complete faith that Sakura had taken advantage of the opportunity to practice her new lock picking skills on her old sensei's desk.

Had Kakashi mentioned how proud of his students he was?

"And then what did you do, Sakura-chan?" asked the Sandaime.

"Well, I hid one of the files in my weapons pouch, and then I went to find Sasuke-kun and Naruto, because if Mizuki-sensei really was a traitor, I couldn't leave either of them alone with him. Then we took the file I'd found to Kakashi-sensei."

"Yeah!" Naruto interrupted. "And Kakashi-nii told Sakura-chan good work and then asked us how we wanted to handle things since it was our mission, and we decided that we should apprehend Mizuki-sensei before he had a chance to influence any more kids or hide the evidence."

The Sandaime turned a deeply unimpressed expression on Kakashi, who just beamed right back at him. If the Sandaime hadn't wanted to deal with this sort of thing, he shouldn't have given Kakashi a genin team.

"They had a very good plan," Kakashi told him cheerfully, "and I was on hand the entire time, ready to step in if something went wrong."

"And half of Mizuki-kun's hair had been singed off when you brought him in because…?"

"I miscalculated my fire jutsu," Sasuke blatantly lied at the same time Naruto solemnly told the Sandaime, "Sasuke-teme takes traitors to the village very personally."

* * *

"So, is this the third time or the fourth time that Kakashi-sensei has hired us for a D-rank at his bakery?" asked Sakura as she squished the excess water out of her sponge.

"Fourth." Sasuke was scrubbing his sponge over a particularly stubborn patch of dirt on the glass of the bakery's front window.

"Yeah, it's great, isn't it?" Naruto nodded. He was swiping off the leftover water from his section of window with a rubber scraper, leaving behind wide stripes of sparkling clean glass.

"The 4am wake up, I could do without." Sakura peered through the window to where Kakashi was talking to another jounin, who was holding two loaves of bread and had a senbon sticking out of his mouth like a toothpick. That did not look safe. She was starting to wonder if mental instability was a requirement for becoming a jounin. "I wonder why he wears that mask all the time," she muttered to herself, not expecting any sort of answer.

"Oh, that's because nii-san has gills," Naruto informed her solemnly. "He's very sensitive about them and doesn't like it when people stare."

"WHAT?!" Sakura yelped, her head snapping to look at Naruto. Sasuke dropped his sponge.

"Haha! Gotcha!" Naruto grinned. "It's actually his Hatake clan marks. They're a really weird color."

Sasuke narrowed his eyes at him suspiciously.

"…You're lying."

"Could be." Naruto folded his arms behind his head and beamed cheerfully. "But why would I lie about nii-san having fangs? The first time I saw them, I thought he was a vampire!"

"Naruto, come on – be serious!" Sakura protested. "Why does he wear that mask all the time?"

"I am being serious – that cystic acne of his is no joking matter!"

By the time Kakashi made it outside to find out what all the shouting was about, Naruto was lying on the ground, howling with laughter, and Sakura and Sasuke had up-ended the entire bucket of soapy water over his head.

* * *

Sasuke had started showing up at the Ryouken Bakery on Saturday mornings, because, well, his sensei was weird, but the bakery was a better place to be than the empty Uchiha Compound when he woke up from the usual 5am nightmare. And Sasuke kind of liked the smell of bread dough. His mother used to make bread sometimes, and it was… nice to remember her that way. Having something to do with his hands that wasn't training related was nice, too.

Kakashi never commented on Sasuke's presence even though they never had team training on Saturdays. Sometimes they would talk a bit – usually about inconsequential things. Naruto generally showed up around 10am and had never questioned Sasuke's desire to be at the bakery either. (Naruto seemed to take it for granted that everyone should want to spend their free time at the Ryouken Bakery.)

The smooth, soft ball of dough moved rhythmically beneath Sasuke's hands. It was strangely peaceful.

"So what are you going to do after you murder Itachi, anyway?" asked Kakashi absently.

Sasuke froze mid-knead. He glanced sideways at Kakashi, but his sensei seemed to be completely absorbed in shaping loaves.

"Why?"

"Oh, just wondering." Kakashi didn't look up from his work.

"Hn. I don't have a plan for after that." Sasuke started kneading again with more force than necessary. Silence stretched out, and for some reason, Sasuke felt the uncharacteristic urge to fill it. He tried to imagine his life after he'd finally killed Itachi. He couldn't picture it.

"You're not planning to die in the process are you?" Kakashi asked as he headed for the ovens with a different tray of loaves that had apparently finished proofing.

" _No_ ," Sasuke snapped, annoyed. What sort of stupid question was that?

Kakashi just hummed thoughtfully to himself, slid the loaves into one of the massive ovens, and performed a quick mist jutsu.

"Well, I suppose you could always restart the police force," he commented distractedly. "If you want to stick with the theme of honoring your clan's memory and all that."

"What?"

"The Sandaime has never gotten around to restarting the force, and I know it's caused problems. If you want to pursue your quest for justice after Itachi is dead, being a regular shinobi probably isn't going to work well for you but being a police officer might."

Sasuke stared blankly into middle space, his hands continuing to work the dough in front of him on automatic. He'd always thought of his quest as one of vengeance. He'd never thought of it as justice before. His soul burned frantically when he thought of vengeance, but his resolved firmed and held steady when he thought of justice. Perhaps that was a better way of thinking of it – as justice, not vengeance – because Sasuke knew perfectly well that fire was just as likely to harm as help.

Sasuke tried to picture himself as a police officer hunting down people who had hurt others. The image had a certain appeal.

He finally offered a noncommittal "Hn" in response. It was something to think about.

* * *

Sasuke hadn't meant to yell at Sakura – the words had just tumbled out, short and sharp and aimed to hurt. But, damn it, she'd been complaining about her parents. Her _parents_. Did she have any idea what he would _give_ to have his mother alive to scold him about his eating habits?

Sakura's eyes had gone wide and hurt, and Sasuke had stormed away without apologizing, because he was a little afraid that, if he opened his mouth again, all that would come out would be more bile and venom, and Sakura didn't actually deserve it. Naruto had been shouting after him, but Sasuke had ignored him.

Now Sasuke was in a tree near Training Field 6 lost in dark thoughts and definitely not hiding. He scowled as Kakashi settled on the branch just below his and viciously wished for a moment that he had Sakura's talent for making her chakra invisible. Sasuke let the silence stretch out for two agonizing minutes before he couldn't stand it anymore and snapped,

"Are you here to lecture me or be condescending and try to say that you 'understand how I feel'? Because you _don't_. I lost _everything_. You have _no idea_ how it feels."

Kakashi stared up at him with that infuriatingly neutral look for a moment before he spoke.

"Well, by the time I was born there were only two members of the Hatake clan left, and I never had an older brother, so in that respect, no, I don't. But you're hardly the only person to have lost everything." Sasuke let out a skeptical snort. "Did you learn how the Third Shinobi War started at the Academy?"

Sasuke frowned slightly at this seemingly abrupt change of topic.

"Iruka-sensei said a mission went wrong, and Suna used it as an excuse to attack us," he muttered.

"My father led that mission. He was one of the best jounin in the village, and they used him as a scapegoat to blame for starting the war. His teammates stopped talking to him. No one would look him in the eye. Some civilians threw things. Some shop keepers refused to serve us. It just got worse and worse no matter what he did. He finally committed suicide when I was eight. I found his body when I came home from training." Kakashi's voice was carefully blank and emotionless in a way that Sasuke recognized far too well.

"My best friend sacrificed his life to save mine on a mission. He probably wouldn't have had to if I had just listened to him in the first place. His name," Kakashi pushed up his hitai-ate and opened the left eye that Sasuke hadn't even realized he still owned, "was Obito Uchiha." And Sasuke _gaped_ , because that was a sharingan. That was a gods damned, fully-formed _sharingan_. "I lost my eye on that mission, and as he lay dying, Obito gave me his. It was my first mission as a jounin. I was thirteen. Less than a year later," Kakasi held a cupped hand over the sharingan, "my other friend and teammate threw herself in front of one of my jutsus and used me to commit suicide. She did it to protect the village. Her name was Rin Nohara." Kakashi lowered his hand to reveal the black pinwheel of the mangekyou. "My hand went straight through her heart. I still haven't forgiven her."

Something in Sasuke's shocked brain finally clicked, because he may only have been eight when his clan was wiped out, but he knew – he _knew_ – how much trauma was required to gain the mangekyou. The elders used to call it the final gift of tragedy (even if it was a gift that some, like Itachi, had abused). It was physical proof that Kakashi may have never born witness to his clan's massacre, but on some level, he still _understood_. He _really did_. Sasuke truly wasn't alone in his pain like he had always thought. It was a revelation – a relief on a profound and visceral level.

"My sensei and his wife died protecting the village the night of the Kyuubi attack, and after that I'd run out of people to lose." Kakashi closed his eye and pulled his hitai-ate back into its usual slant. He turned his head away from Sasuke to stare out over the training field and seemed content to leave Sasuke to his own thoughts for a while.

Sasuke's mind, however, was still all but blank with shock. He'd spent _so long_ isolating himself, because he'd thought his grief and pain were unique, and he'd been wrong. After a long while, Sasuke's branch became too empty, and he clambered down to join Kakashi on his branch instead. Sasuke hugged his legs and rested his chin on his knees.

"What about Naruto?" he asked, not looking over at Kakashi.

"I didn't start getting to know Naruto until he was six, and I didn't _officially_ meet until he was eight." Kakashi's tone was fond.

Sasuke's nose wrinkled slightly.

"How did _that_ work?"

"I was in ANBU," Kakashi shrugged.

"So?"

"All ANBU are weird – it's the only way to cope with the stress. Naruto and I were sort of… pen pals, I guess? Only he did all the writing, and I mostly left him food, because six year olds shouldn't live pretty much on cup ramen."

"What changed, then?"

"One of my former subordinates, whom I'd helped to train, massacred his entire clan."

Sasuke's breath froze in his chest. He wasn't sure how many shocks and revelations he could take in one day.

"You… _trained_ Itachi?" Sasuke whispered.

Kakashi looked over at him. What little of his expression that could be seen was weary.

"In part. He was on my squad when he first joined ANBU."

Sasuke didn't ask any more questions. His head was reeling yet again from too much information. It was going to take a while to process.

He'd never really thought about how Itachi's betrayal might have effected others in the village.

Silence stretched out with none of the tension it had held before. Finally Kakashi rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck from side to side.

"Take ten more minutes, then run two laps of the village for verbally abusing your teammate, and come back and apologize to Sakura. I'll have a chat with her and remind her to be more sensitive to the fact that all of her teammates are orphans."

Sasuke nodded, and Kakashi hopped down out of the tree.

* * *

Sakura still had a crush on Sasuke, but… she wasn't sure if she was in love with him anymore. Or if she had ever actually been in love with him in the first place. Because the longer Sakura was on Team 7, the more she realized that she didn't really _know_ Sasuke. _Naruto_ seemed to understand Sasuke better than she did, and that sort of stung.

There was also the fact that Inner Sakura _really_ wanted to punch Sasuke in the face. _Hard_. Because all it would have taken was the slightest of flinches for that kunai at her neck to break skin – to slit her throat. She was just lucky that Kakashi-sensei was better shinobi than that. Sakura may have forgiven Sasuke for his rash actions, but Inner Sakura definitely _hadn't_.

"All right." Kakashi looked between Sakura and Sasuke. "Taijutsu only. First one to go under the water loses. Understand?"

They both nodded.

"Kick his ass, Sakura-chan!" shouted Naruto from the river bank where he was trying to use his chakra to split leaves.

"Go." Kakashi swept one hand down and then stepped out of the way.

Sasuke's taijutsu was stronger than Sakura's, but she was much better at water walking.

Sakura ducked out of the way of Sasuke's first kick. This was the third time Kakashi-sensei had had them spar this way. Sasuke had won the first two, and even though she was improving, Sakura didn't have much hope that she'd win this one either.

She ducked again and threw a punch that Sasuke blocked with ease but-

Sakura noticed for the first time that Sasuke's footing wobbled when his attention was split between blocking her and staying upright. She hadn't caught that during their previous spars. Maybe… she could use that?

She dropped and tried to sweep his feet out from under him. He jumped over her leg easily, and when he landed, his feet were rock steady. Okay. Keep his attention off his feet.

Sakura wouldn't say that she was holding her own exactly, but by keeping her blows aimed at Sasuke's face and shoulders, she definitely wasn't losing as fast as last time. Sasuke wasn't moving his feet quite as much as he should be – wasn't quite as poised and graceful as usual. Inner Sakura was taking a certain amount of smug satisfaction from that. At least she was going to make Sasuke _work_ for this victory.

Sakura feinted left just as someone in the next training field over disturbed a flock of crows, and the birds burst from the treetops cawing raucously. Sasuke's eyes flicked to the crows for the narrowest fraction of a second.

There was a _crack_ as Sakura's right jab connected solidly with Sasuke's nose.

Sakura caught the briefest glimpse of Sasuke's shocked expression before he apparently lost focus entirely and disappeared under the water with a splash. She gaped down at the rippling water. Had she- Had she just _beaten_ Sasuke? And… oh gods, had she broken his nose?

"YEAH! That was AWESOME, Sakura-chan!" cheered Naruto.

Sasuke spluttered to the surface. Sakura bit back six different apologies, because she finally knew Sasuke well enough to know that he wouldn't appreciate _any_ of them. She offered him a hand up, and he took it. Blood was streaming down his face. Oh gods, she really _had_ broken his nose….

"Good hit," Sasuke commented as he pressed one of his arm guards under his nose to help staunch the bleeding. He gave her a small, approving nod. It was the most acknowledgement Sakura could ever remember receiving from him.

A hand landed on top of Sakura's head.

"Good job, Sakura." Kakashi sounded… proud.

"But it was mostly just luck," protested Sakura despite the warmth starting to glow in her chest.

"We're shinobi. A lucky win is still a win. And you had the skill to back up your luck."

"Yeah, Sakura-chan!" Naruto came wobbling out onto the water to join them. His water walking was doing vastly better, but he wasn't quite up for doing more than katas on the river, yet. "Before you wouldn't have been able to hit Sasuke-teme even if he _had_ given you an opening!" Naruto looked over at Sasuke and burst out laughing. "Your shorts are see-through when they're wet! I can see your boxers!"

"Shut up, dobe," Sasuke muttered and made a halfhearted attempt to sweep Naruto's legs out from under him. Naruto yelped and nearly lost his balance.

"Let's see that nose." Sasuke moved his arm so that Kakashi could get a better look at the damage. Kakashi nodded to himself. "We'll stop by the hospital before we head over to the Mission Room to pick up today's D-rank."

Sakura trailed after her teammates as they headed off the river to collect their things. Inner Sakura was still gloating. Sakura herself was feeling an odd combination of shocked and giddy. She'd always limited herself to book smarts because, well, parents had never entirely approved of the Academy – not really – and she's been _so distracted_ by Sasuke… she'd never really thought that field work was an area where she could succeed.

But between the bell test and catching Mizuki-sensei and now this….

Maybe she had been wrong. Maybe she could be strong in her own right.

Maybe Sakura didn't need to worry about her teammates leaving her behind, because she could keep up with them all by herself.

* * *

"-and then Sakura hit him square in the nose while he was distracted. Sasuke was so surprised that he completely lost focus on his feet and went under," Kakashi finished. "It's the first spar that Sakura has actually won."

"Sounds like they're all doing well," Iruka concluded as he stirred the pan of beef stir fry on his stove. Fridays had sort of turned into Kakashi's weekly update/teaching-advice-session and dinner with Iruka. Kakashi still wasn't allowed within three feet of the stove under pain of pain.

"Yeah. I think they're ready to start taking C-ranks." Kakashi watched Iruka's back carefully, trying to predict Iruka's reaction from the shifting of his shoulders. He didn't detect any disapproving shoulder rolling or stiffening, so Kakashi didn't think that he was about to be yelled at.

"I don't see why not," Iruka agreed casually. Kakashi had been expecting to have to defend his opinion a bit. He still wasn't sure how many D-ranks was sufficient D-ranks for a team. He didn't actually _remember_ all that much of his time as a genin when he was five, and then he'd mostly done D-ranks with Obito and Rin on sufferance before they made chuunin as well. (Kakashi had been field promoted to chuunin at six and then Konoha had lied about his status so that he could be snuck into the chuunin exams with his teammates to help ensure they passed.) And that had been during a war – the sooner genin teams could get to doing useful things like C-ranks, the better. "A few C-ranks should give you an idea of what survival training areas they need to work on."

"No lecture about how I'm pushing them too fast?" Kakashi asked hesitantly just to be sure.

"From what you've told me, their teamwork is getting pretty solid which is the main point of D-ranks. Sasuke is listening to his teammates, Sakura's endurance has been slowing increasing and her taijutsu is improving, and Naruto seems to be developing some impressive leadership skills and should be able to start learning elemental jutsus soon. Plus, I've seen all three of them taking the shortcut over the roofs, so obviously their chakra control is doing well. At this point, a C-rank sounds like the next logical step."

"Oh. Good." Kakashi paused for a moment. "I was just wondering, because Asuma hasn't taken Team Quick Bread on any C-ranks, yet, and I sort of assumed he'd be the first one to take his team out of the village."

Iruka rolled his eyes.

" _Why_ do you keep calling them that?"

Kakashi shrugged.

"Quick breads use a chemical raising agent instead of yeast and don't require any kneading. They're basically minimum time and effort for maximum yield which is what that team is. They probably shouldn't have all been put on a team together until they made chuunin so that they could learn to work with other people before being stuck in their parents' patented formula." Kakashi had given it more thought than he probably should, but he also remembered other people trying to stuff him into his father's mold when he was young. He could sympathize.

Iruka just shook his head and dumped the finished stir fry into a bowl.

"True, but you try explaining that to the Sandaime and their parents. I was out-voted. Hopefully Asuma will take them on some missions with other teams to compensate for that." Iruka plunked the bowl down on the table as well as a bowl of rice. "How would you feel about an escort and protection mission for your team's first C-rank?"

"Sounds good to me."

"Excellent. There's a bridge builder from Wave Country who wants an escort home and someone to guard his bridge from ruffians until construction is complete. Drop by the Mission Room tomorrow morning, and I'll assign it to your team."

"Well then," Kakashi scooped some rice onto his plate, "I guess only one question remains – will you look after my sourdough starter for me while I'm gone?"

Iruka half-choked on a piece of beef.

"Your _what_?"

"My sourdough starter, Ukki-san. Don't ask – Naruto named it. It's five years old, and I can't leave it by itself – it'll starve."

"The _hell_ is a sourdough starter? And why do you apparently need to _feed_ it?!"

"It's a live yeast culture. It gives bread a more robust flavor. I've had it since I started the bakery," Kakashi explained patiently.

"And Naruto named it because…?"

"He found it in my fridge and said that, if it was alive, it needed a name."


	8. Chapter 8

If Tazuna had wandered into the Ryouken Bakery, Kakashi would have kicked him back out again. Rude and drunk was never an attractive combination. Rude, drunk, and taking potshots at Naruto left Kakashi itching to dropkick their client. He was having to close his bakery for _weeks_ because of this man. It wasn't worth it.

Professional. Professional. Be professional.

Naruto's florescent orange village clothes had been replaced with rusty orange, blue, and black for the mission. After his dunking in the river, Sasuke had exchanged his white shorts for dusty brown ones which were definitely a less eye-catching color. Sakura's red dress was still rather bright for an out-of-village mission, but for a C-rank escort it ought to be all right.

All three of them had done a good job not over packing, and Sakura had even thought to bring a few basic medical supplies. They also all looked like they were considering throttling their client. Sakura's eyebrow was twitching, Sasuke was glowering into the middle distance, and Naruto was growling periodically under his breath. At least most civilians didn't antagonize the shinobi they hired. Well, okay, some nobles did, but that could probably be attributed to stupidity brought on by inbreeding. And escorting nobles was generally A-rank material.

Hmmm… while hiding their client's body could probably be considered a teambuilding exercise, it wasn't a good precedent to set. What they needed was a distraction.

"Merits of shuriken versus kunai. You have ten minutes to decide amongst yourselves which is best, and then you have to convince me," Kakashi announced.

"Kunai," Naruto decided at the same time Sasuke stated, "Obviously shuriken."

They frowned at each other and then turned to Sakura for a tiebreaker. She looked thoughtful for a moment.

"Actually, I always thought senbon were better than either shuriken or kunai."

Naruto looked scandalized and then turned to Kakashi.

"Is she allowed to vote for senbon?"

Kakashi considered this.

"I'll allow it," he decided.

"Sakura-chan, how can you say _senbon_?! They're so fiddly-"

Kakashi smiled to himself as his students started debating weapons. There. That ought to remind Tazuna that the twelve year olds he was bating could kill him. It was at least a five day trip to Wave Country, and hopefully Tazuna would calm down his attitude for the remainder of it.

Five minutes later, Sakura had agreed that kunai were more versatile than senbon, but Sasuke was still staunchly defending the honor of shuriken. Kakashi glanced down at the puddle of water as they walked by it. Well, damn. That wasn't good.

If Kakashi had been leading a team of chuunin, he would have been tempted to let this play out a bit to see whether the shinobi poorly hidden as a puddle had a grudge against Konoha or were after Tazuna, but this was Team 7's first C-rank. Not a chance.

Kakashi dropped a little farther back from his team. When the blade chain flew out to ensnare him, Kakashi ducked, wove out of the way, and slammed a kunai into the earth, pinning the chain to the ground. Then he cracked the two chuunin's heads together. What sort of incompetents disguised themselves as a puddle miles away from any river when it hadn't rained in three days? And who had let these idiots out of their village unsupervised?

Kakashi looked up to find a semicircle of shocked faces staring back at him.

"I'm going to have to agree with Naruto and Sakura – kunai _are_ more versatile," he shrugged. "Now, who noticed that puddle?"

Only Sakura raised a hesitant hand.

"I thought the ground was awfully dry for such a large puddle," she admitted.

"Good situational awareness. Never brush off anything that looks out of place – it can be a lifesaver." Kakashi hoisted an unconscious chuunin a little higher under one arm. "Sasuke, get the rope out of your pack and help me tie these two up. Naruto, Sakura, guard Tazuna-san. We don't know if they had any comrades."

Tazuna looked startled by their attackers but somehow not _surprised_ to be attacked by shinobi rather than thieves or gang members. Kakashi narrowed his eye. He had a feeling that he and Tazuna needed to have a _talk_.

* * *

"All right, let's make camp here for the night," Kakashi announced when the sun started to sink low on the horizon. "Work together to get a fire going." He wagged a finger at Sasuke. "No fire jutsus – that's cheating. I'm going to have a word with Tazuna-san while you do that. Remember to stay aware of your surroundings." Kakashi put one hand on Tazuna's shoulder and subtly but firmly steered him to the far side of the clearing from where his students were searching for dry wood. "You and I need to talk."

"Huh? About what?" Tazuna whined. He was trying to look guileless and missing by a mile.

"Why are there trained shinobi after you, and how many more should we be expecting?"

"I don't know what you're-"

"Lying about the danger level of a request," Kakashi interrupted, his tone deadly polite, "is sufficient cause for me to terminate this mission _right now_ , take my students home, and leave you here to die. I won't even lose any sleep over it, though my students might complain a bit, because they're still young and rather idealistic. Now tell me everything before I terminate this mission on _principle_."

Tazuna's face had gone an interesting shade of green-gray. He started talking – fast.

"Gato has Wave Country in an economic strangle hold. Not even our Daimyo can afford to pay for more than a C-rank mission from Konoha or any other hidden village. Once my bridge is complete, it should open up trade again, but that's put it in competition with Gato's monopoly. My village is _dying_. We're _desperate_. The only shinobi he's ever sent have been the lower ranked ones – chuunin? We're all civilians – he's never needed more than that."

Kakashi sighed and ran a hand through his hair.

"If you'd been honest about your situation, the Hokage probably would have authorized this as a B-rank mission with the proviso that you pay the rest of the fee after the bridge was completed. As it is, my team can only accompany you as far as your home."

"But-"

"My students are _genin_. Very promising genin, I'll admit, but this is their _first_ mission outside Konoha. They are _not_ ready to hold off an organized attack of chuunin level shinobi."

* * *

"In other words, welcome to your second accidental B-rank mission," Kakashi concluded.

Sakura, Naruto and Sasuke exchanged glances.

"So we're not going to protect the bridge once we get there?" Naruto asked.

Kakashi shook his head.

"We have no idea how many shinobi Gato may have hired. Our team is too small to protect an entire bridge the size of the one Tazuna-san is building. Our mission scroll said it was two hundred feet. Apparently it's closer to two _thousand_ feet."

Off to one side, Tazuna flinched slightly.

"I forgot a zero?" he suggested weakly.

"Of course you did," Kakashi agreed with false cheer. "Since this isn't a regular C-rank mission, we're going to be sleeping in shifts. I'll take the first watch. Sakura, you'll have the second watch. Sasuke, you're third, and Naruto, you have the dawn watch. Two hours each. If you notice anything out of the ordinary, wake me right away. Now," Kakashi pulled one of his two storage scrolls off his belt, "who wants flatbread?"

"You brought bread dough on a mission?" asked Sakura, sounding scandalized.

Sasuke snorted.

"Why are you surprised?"

Kakashi just hummed to himself as he unsealed his first batch of dough and his skillet. He might not be able to knead his stress and worries away at the moment, but at the very least, cooking some flatbread ought to help a bit.

* * *

Three and a half days on high alert and there had been no further hints of danger. They were less than an hour from Tazuna's home now, and Kakashi was on edge. This all felt far too easy. When missions went wrong for him, they went _spectacularly_ wrong. This seemed too simple.

Kakashi rolled his shoulders. He'd sealed his pack ANBU-style into his spare storage scroll in favor of his tanto. It was probably overkill, but if he had to fight off an army of low level shinobi at a moment's notice, he wanted his sword to be readily available.

"What was that?" asked Naruto suspiciously as something rustled off to one side of the path. He'd paused and pulled a kunai.

Sasuke peered around Naruto and into the bush the noise had come from, two shuriken in hand.

"Hn. It's just a rabbit."

Sakura leaned around to look as well.

"Yeah, but a white rabbit at this time of year?" she pointed out, her expression dubious.

"Why wouldn't it be white?" Naruto asked.

Kakashi widened his senses as his suspicion mounted. Because what the unseasonably white rabbit mostly screamed to him was 'distraction.' He turned, senses searching and-

 _There_.

" _Duck!_ " he shouted. His students and Tazuna hit the ground just in time as the massive sword that would have decapitated them scythed through the air.

Kakashi was already rolling to his feet, tanto in hand, when the blade slammed into a tree trunk, gouging deep into the wood. Between one breath and the next, a man was crouched on the flat of the sword like a deadly platform. The sun caught the Kiri hitai-ate the man wore and glinted.

Oh, _hell_.

"Hmph." The man straightened up. "Not a single opponent with even a Bingo Book entry. Hardly even worth my time."

Well, as far as things going catastrophically wrong on missions went, being accosted by an S-class missing-nin on his genin team's first C-rank mission was definitely up there. Kakashi may have been off of active duty long enough to no longer feature in most Bingo Books, but Zabuza Momochi, the Demon of the Bloody Mist, had definitely _not_ been.

"Ah, well, not all of us can be famous," Kakashi shrugged. "Get in defensive formation, and guard Tazuna-san," he called over his shoulder without taking his eye off Zabuza. For the moment, he had the element of surprise on his side, and he was hoping to take full advantage of that. "I don't suppose you could be convinced to just let us go on our way," Kakashi suggested casually, subtly adjusting his stance, "since we're clearly not worth such a notorious shinobi's time."

Zabuza's eyes narrowed.

"Actually, you do look familiar."

Damn it. So much for the element of surprise.

"Like you said, I'm not in any Bingo Books." Kakashi caught the telltale shifting of Zabuza's feet. He had just enough time to shove up his hitai-ate before he was blocking a blow aimed at his head. "Not recently anyway."

Thank gods for his tanto, otherwise he'd be trying to block that ridiculous sword with just kunai and armor-backed gloves and be at risk of losing a hand.

Zabuza snorted.

"The son of Konoha's White Fang back from the dead. I remember you. Overrated, I always thought. When no one claimed credit for killing you, I figured you had followed your dad's example and offed yourself."

Kakashi reminded himself that getting angry just gave the enemy the upper hand. He gave a powerful shove to disengage his sword from Zabuza's and then leapt back out of the weapon's monstrous reach. His mind was flicking through everything he remembered of the Bingo Book entry on Zabuza in search of something useful. Water jutsus. One of the Seven Swordsmen. Ex-ANBU, so presumably paranoid. Speculated to be something of a sadist but unconfirmed. Killed his entire graduating class.

Fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

Lightning jutsus and mind games. Try to get that sword away from him, though that was a longshot. Few people outside of Konoha had any idea how the sharingan worked or what exactly it even _did_. Play that up to the hilt, lure him out onto the nearby river, and electrify the whole damn thing first chance he got. Keep him as far from Team 7 as possible.

He could do this.

Then Zabuza took the opportunity to shroud the entire area in thick, unnaturally dense fog.

Kakashi really hated fighting Kiri shinobi.

He dispersed a water buunshin and then took advantage of the fog to replace himself with a water buunshin as well and left the buunshin to fill in his team about who Zabuza was. He'd copied that jutsu _years_ ago, but Zabuza didn't need to know that. Let the head games begin.

Kakashi blocked a blow aimed for Tazuna after his buunshin was sliced in half and managed to twist and kick Zabuza in the solar plexus. The missing-nin staggered back with an _omph_ , and Kakashi pushed his advantage. He ducked and slashed under Zabuza's long reach. The tip of his tanto caught a shallow slice across the other man's ribs before Zabuza was out of reach again.

Kakashi flipped over a swipe aimed at his legs and just missed putting his tanto through the hole in the end of Zabuza's giant meat cleaver of a sword. He danced back towards the river, and Zabuza stalked after him, clearly irritated now. Kakashi flicked his fingers through the seals of a wind jutsu around the hilt of his tanto. Blades of wind slashed through the fog, clearing the air as Zabuza dodged out of the way.

Kakashi's feet landed on the surface of the river. Blocking yet another overarm swing of Zabuza's sword shook Kakashi's entire frame painfully, but he held firm. He was built more for speed than brutal upper body strength.

"You're quite the pest aren't you, Hatake," Zabuza sneered.

"So I've been told."

This time it was Zabuza who abruptly disengaged almost sending Kakashi stumbling. Kakashi leapt high to avoid losing a leg-

" _Hageshi tsunami_."

Oh, _fuck_. His hands were moving to form the seal for a shunshin, but it was already too late.

A two story wall of water slammed Kakashi out of the air and sent him crashing under the surface of the river – the worst _possible_ place to be when fighting someone who specialized in _water_ jutsus. Gods damn it _all_. Kakahi struck out desperately for the surface, sword sheathed and head spinning somewhat from the impact. The water around him was already becoming steadily denser with chakra as his hand finally broke through to air.

"I think not. _Haisui Suirou no jutsu_."

Because that's what Kakashi really needed in his life right now – to find out that Zabuza had apparently come up with his own nasty variation of the already unpleasant Water Prison jutsu. That had definitely _not_ been mentioned on his Bingo Book entry. His mind ran frantically through every jutsu he had ever copied or memorized.

Nothing. He could think of _nothing_ that was big enough of an impact to shatter the sphere he was trapped in without simultaneously killing him in the process due to the confined space. Kakashi could already feel the jutsu starting to suck greedily at his chakra reserves.

Why was he still alive? Kakashi could barely move due to the sheer density of the water trapping him. All Zabuza had to do was run the Water Prison through with his sword, and Kakashi was dead. Why was he-?

Kakashi spotted the water buunshin walking towards shore.

Of course. Why kill your enemy straight away when you could slaughter their genin team and client in front of their eyes and then take your time killing them after when they were half-drained of chakra.

"RUN!" he shouted. "The buunshin can only get so far from its creator! Just _RUN_!"

Kakashi knew that they wouldn't the instant that he saw the mulish expression settle onto Naruto's face.

He was going to watch his students die, and then he was going to die.

 _I guess I'll be seeing you soon, Obito. Sorry, sensei._

Why had he ever agreed to leave his bakery?

…

Like _hell_ was he letting his students die without a fight. Kakashi started sluggishly forming hand seals for the first drilling-style water jutsu he could think of. Maybe it would just exhaust his chakra reserves faster, but he had to at least _try_. If nothing else, it might help further divide Zabuza's attention.

* * *

"Hey Sakura-chan, what's the difference in strength between a buunshin and the shinobi who created it again?" asked Naruto.

"About a tenth of the original shinobi's strength," Sakura answered automatically. She wondered how Academy facts came to her so easily even when her knees were shaking and her heart felt like it was trying to slam its way out of her chest.

"You got an idea, dobe?" asked Sasuke, never taking his eyes off the buunshin's slow, almost lazy approach.

"Yeah. We need Kakashi-nii to defeat this guy, right? So I'm thinking army style." Naruto's teeth were bared in a fearsome facsimile of a grin. "Sasuke, you're in charge of getting Sakura-chan to the tree."

"Got it." Sasuke pulled a windmill shuriken out of his pack. "Forget moderation – go for chaos. Also," his eyes flicked ever so briefly to Sakura, "shuriken are better than rocks."

Sakura dipped her chin in understanding and shifted to strengthen her stance a bit more.

"Let's do this." Her voice barely even quavered.

In the sheer _pandemonium_ that was close to a hundred of Naruto's shadow clones henged into the various members of Team 7 all swarming Zabuza and his water buunshin at once, Sakura felt Sasuke's hand on the base of her neck just above her pack and henged herself into a shuriken. It was a vastly disorienting sensation to suddenly be small and shoved into Sasuke's weapons pouch. Bumping in the darkness was almost enough to turn her stomach and break her concentration. She breathed through the discomfort and mounting anxiety. Her hands needed to be steady – Kakashi's life depended on it and so did hers and the rest of her team's.

And then there was a hand grasping her, bright light, and Sasuke's voice whispering, "Aim for the hand controlling the Water Prison."

Then she was flying, whirling through the air.

 _I am air. I am metal. There is nothing to detect – not even a hole where natural chakra should be. I am invisible._

Sakura zipped past Zabuza's left ear. He tilted his head slightly to avoid her but didn't spare her even a glance. Sakura reached the peak of her arc – high and directly behind Zabuza's head. She released her henge with barely a whisper of chakra. Zabuza was holding Sasuke's windmill shuriken in his left hand. For a moment, she felt weightless.

Sakura pulled three kunai from her weapons pouch. She aimed – rotator cuff, nerve cluster above the elbow, delicate tendons of the wrist. Her mind felt strangely calm, almost serene. She threw.

Zabuza dodged – only one kunai skimming the shallowest of cuts across his bicep – but that was okay, because his concentration had been broken, and the Water Prison had collapsed.

Sakura landed on the surface of the river hard and rolled a couple of times. Thank gods for river sparring practice. She got her feet under her and sprinted for shore. If she stayed out on the water, she'd be leaving herself open to water jutsus that she couldn't block. She'd done her part – now she needed to get the hell out of the way.

* * *

Kakashi's head was close to swimming from chakra loss by the time the sphere around him collapsed (he'd gone through over a dozen jutsus trying to break free of the Water Prison variation, and its chakra consuming water had eaten all of them), but that was all right – he'd completed ANBU missions on less. As Zabuza dropped the windmill shuriken in favor of his sword and whipped around to retaliate against Sakura's sneak attack, Kakashi lashed out, quick as a snake, got one hand through the hole in the end of Zabuza's sword, and _yanked_. It wasn't enough to make him let go, but it did send Zabuza stumbling off balance. Zabuza snarled in frustration and kicked Kakashi hard enough in the chest that he felt his ribs creak. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sakura reach the relative safety of the bank. The boys had somehow managed to disperse the water buunshin somewhere in the chaos of mob warfare – Naruto style.

He was so proud of his kids, but he also sort of wanted to throttle them for scaring him half to death.

Now for no-holds-barred psychological warfare. If Kakashi had learned anything from the on-going 'cursed bread' debacle, it was that even highly trained people did incredibly _stupid_ things if you got them thoroughly enough freaked out. It was an obnoxiously draining genjutsu that Kakashi rarely ever used, but he ought to have enough chakra left for it and to electrify the river and potentially run Zabuza through with a chidori if necessary.

Kakashi looked Zabuza square in the eye and active his sharingan's slightly hypnotic effect that would make his actions appear to be happening simultaneously to Zabuza's instead of fractionally delayed.

Five minutes and fifteen perfectly mirrored jutsus later, Zabuza was starting to get that same wild-eyed look that Hawk used to get when he saw new recruits eating toast. And then Zabuza did something every trained shinobi knew better than to do – he turned, partially blocking his sightline of Kakashi, in an attempt to hide his hand seals from Kakashi's view. Perfect. The opening he'd been waiting for.

Kakashi flashed through a completely different set of seals from the ones Zabuza was forming and slammed his palm into the surface of the river.

" _Inazuma no jutsu_."

Zabuza shrieked in pain as electricity tore up his legs, but apparently Kakashi hadn't made his jutsu powerful enough, because the man started staggering towards the shore and Team 7 instead of being incapacitated.

 _Damn it_.

Kakashi threw two kunai. They hit Zabuza in the leg and shoulder, but he barely slowed down. Kakashi ran after him, hands starting to form more seals. It looked like he'd have to resort to the chidori and hope his reflexes weren't too compromi-

Two senbon sprouted from the side of Zabuza's neck. The missing-nin collapsed unmoving on the river bank, body half in and half out of the water.

"Thank you, jounin-san. I'll take it from here."

Kakashi didn't relax when he saw the Kiri hunter-nin. He'd spent too many years in ANBU to relax when faced with one of those masks, but he did pause. The small, cynical, ANBU part of his brain grumbled, 'Typical hunter-nin, showing up at the last minute to claim all of the credit with none of the work,' but another part of his brain was insisting that something… wasn't right. He unsheathed his tanto.

Kakashi walked forward and knelt to feel Zabuza's throat for a pulse. Nothing.

"Sensei?" asked Sakura uncertainly.

"He's dead," Kakashi told her, but his voice sounded uncertain even to his own ears. Why? What was he missing? His mind felt hazy.

He straightened up, careful to keep his movements smooth and strong while there was a foreign nin watching.

"I'll take his body to be destroyed now." The hunter-nin stepped forward almost too fast and hauled Zabuza's body over his shoulder. "Forgive me, but I cannot perform my duties while there are foreign eyes watching."

Kakashi frowned. That _definitely_ wasn't right. Hunter-nin never _moved_ bodies before dealing with them. He took a step forward, but he was too slow. The hunter-nin and Zabuza's body disappeared in a swirl of air and chakra.

The thought that had been nagging at his fuzzy mind finally fully emerged. It was a conversation he'd had once with Genma at the bakery about acupuncture points and senbon and how a true master could theoretically use them to simulate… death.

 _Fuck._

Kakashi turned to his team, but the movement was too sharp, too sudden. The edges of his vision went gray. He'd used even more chakra than he'd realized. His lips tried to form the words 'not dead' and 'accomplice,' but he couldn't seem to put any sound behind them. The hilt of his tanto slipped from suddenly numb fingers. The chakra under his feet gave out, and his sandals splashed into shallow water. His knees buckled.

Kakashi was unconscious before he even hit the ground.

* * *

" _ **NII-SAN!**_ "

Naruto's scream rattled Sakura's bones. Her mind felt numb.

But… they'd won, hadn't they? Zabuza was dead. The hunter-nin had taken his body away. They'd _won_. So why was Kakashi crumpled on the ground like a broken doll?

Naruto raced forward, thudded to his knees, and grabbed Kakashi by his shoulders. He shook him violently. Kakashi's head lolled.

"Nii-san! _Nii-san_! Come on – wake up! You gotta wake up! We're almost done the mission – another half hour of walking and then the old man is home, and we're _done_. Please, you've got to wake up!"

"I thought he was your teacher." Tazuna's voice was a hoarse whisper, and his face had gone gray.

"He basically adopted Naruto," Sakura whispered.

Next to her, Sasuke's skin was chalky, and his hands were shaking slightly. His eyes had gone alarmingly blank.

Naruto had stopped shouting and was rocking back and forth gently. He looked like he was fighting back tears.

There was something they should be doing. Something obvious and simple. Sakura fought the fog of shock that was choking her brain.

Pulse. They had just seen Kakashi fall over the same way Zabuza had, but that didn't mean that he was dead, too. They needed to check for a pulse.

Before Sakura could open her mouth, Sasuke's expression hardened, his hand darted down to his weapons pouch, and he whirled on Tazuna, a kunai in his hand.

"You told us chuunin! _Chuunin_!" Sasuke snarled as Tazuna cringed back from him. "But you've lied about _everything_ else – did you lie about that, too?!"

" _No_ -!"

"Why should we believe _anything_ you say?!" Sasuke demanded, taking a menacing step forward.

Sakura lunged between Sasuke and Tazuna, arms spread wide.

"Sasuke-kun, _no_! He's our _client_!"

Sasuke's eyes narrowed.

"Move, Sakura."

And Sakura just… snapped. Her nerves were frayed and tattered. Her team had been attacked by an S-class missing-nin. She'd henged herself into a shuriken and seen her first man die and her sensei collapse with no apparent cause. They were all in shock and panicking instead of thinking, and they were shinobi, gods damn it, and that _wasn't acceptable behavior_.

Sakura wound her arm back and slapped Sasuke across the face with a resounding _crack_.

" _NO_. We are _shinobi of Konoha_ , and we _do not harm our clients_!" Sakura was shouting, and if a few tears were escaping from the corners of her eyes, she thought that she could be forgiven. She took a deep breath in and out, trying to calm herself. Sasuke was staring at her like he'd never seen her before. He lowered his kunai. "Our first priority in this situation should be making sure Kakashi-sensei is all right and then completing our mission, so," Sakura's voice cracked ever so slightly, and she hated herself just a bit for it, "could one of you _please_ check Kakashi-sensei's pulse, already?"

"Pulse?" Naruto's voice sounded dazed as he lifted his head. Sakura could almost see the moment his mind switched back from blind shock and panic to coherent, logical thought. He pulled aside the high collar of Kakashi's jounin vest and pressed trembling fingers into the side of his throat. His shoulders slumped in relief. "I've got a pulse," he rasped. "Slow and a little weak, but it's there."

"Chakra exhaustion," Sasuke muttered, his head hanging, bangs falling to hide his face. "It's probably chakra exhaustion." He slipped the kunai back into his weapons pouch. "Sorry, Sakura. You're right. I wasn't thinking clearly."

Sakura lowered her arms.

"I don't think any of us really were."

"Come on, guys." Naruto had rolled Kakashi onto his back and was hauling him farther up the river bank so that his legs were no longer trailing into the water. His voice was strained and tight but calm, like he'd shoved all his fear into a box and put it to one side to be dealt with later. "We need to make a stretcher. Kakashi-nii is way too tall for any of us to pick up."

Sasuke pulled off his pack and dug out a spool of chakra wire and his ground sheet.

"We can cut some long branches with kunai."

Sakura eyed Sasuke's ground sheet thoughtfully and then pulled out her own as well.

"One of ours is going to be too short, but if we lair two, that should be long enough," she pointed out.

"Iruka-sensei said that you treat chakra exhaustion basically the same as blood loss and shock, right, Sakura-chan?" Naruto asked, straightening up.

"Yeah. Rest, fluids if they're awake, and keep them warm and dry."

"Right. Okay."

Sasuke finished laying out the two ground sheets and cutting a length of wire to use as a measure.

"I'll go start cutting branches," he announced, standing. "I won't go far."

Sakura headed over to Naruto and Kakashi. Her knees felt weak, and her head felt light, but that wasn't really important at the moment.

Kakashi's clothes were muddy and damp from lying on the river bank, and his pants legs and sandals were soaked.

"Let's move him onto the ground sheets," she suggested. "It'll at least get him a little off the ground."

"Yeah," Naruto nodded. "I'll get his shoulders – you get his feet."

By the time Sasuke returned with two lengths of sturdy branch, Sakura and Naruto were tucking blankets around Kakashi's still form. Sakura sat back on her heels as Sasuke started piercing small holes at regular intervals along the edge of the ground sheets with the tip of a kunai.

"You can stay in my house while he recovers," Tazuna offered quietly. "It's the least I can do after all the trouble I've caused."

"Thank you," Sakura murmured.

The adrenaline was wearing off, and all she really wanted to do was cry and then sleep for a week, but that would have to wait. For now, Sakura's team had a mission to complete and an injured team leader to get to safety.

* * *

 _A/N: I've always thought that Kakashi didn't really get his reputation and nickname of 'Sharingan Kakashi, the Copy-Nin' until after he left ANBU. He was definitely known of before then, but he was doing mostly covert ANBU missions that nobody knew about if they went correctly which isn't a good way to gain a reputation._

Some more Japanese courtesy of our unreliable old friend, Google Translate:  
 _Hageshi tsumani_ \- raging tsunami  
 _Haisui_ \- draining  
 _Inazuma_ \- lightning tree


	9. Chapter 9

Kakashi woke slowly. His head felt cloudy. His muscles felt watery and weak. His ribs felt like they'd been stomped on. The last time he'd felt anything remotely like this was a few years ago when he'd seriously overdone it training with his mangekyou and woken up in the hospital an hour later with an anxious Gai hovering over him.

Kakashi peeled open his right eye. The ceiling above him featured a lightning-like crack and a water stain. Probably not a hospital then. Definitely not Konoha's hospital at the very least. Where was he? What had hap-

Oh gods, _Zabuza_ – he wasn't dead.

Kakashi tried to jerk upright. It didn't work, and he sank back down onto the futon with a groan. He really _hated_ chakra exhaustion.

Someone had stripped him down to his undershirt, mask and boxers. He wondered if it was the same person who owned the futon. Where was his team? Had the fake hunter-nin come back to finish them off while he was unconscious? Probably not if he was still alive, but where were they?

"Kakashi-sensei?" Sakura's head appeared around the doorway as if summoned by his thoughts but more likely summoned by his groan. "You're finally awake!" She padded the rest of the way into the room. "You really scared us. You've been unconscious for a day and a half." She sat down cross-legged by the futon to Kakashi's right.

"Sorry about that," Kakashi murmured. Trying to sit up had taken a worrying amount of effort. Damn missing-nin and their chakra draining techniques. If he was any judge, he was going to be off his feet for _days_.

"I think we'll forgive you under the circumstances," Sakura tried to joke, but it fell rather flat. "Naruto and Sasuke-kun are going to be annoyed that you woke up while they weren't here."

"Not here? Where are they?"

"They're out guarding Tazuna-san. We've been rotating guard duty so one of us would definitely be here when you woke up. Everyone agrees that Gato is really cheap despite being so rich, so he probably won't waste his money on another S-class missing-nin after Zabuza."

Kakashi felt ill in a way that had nothing to do with chakra exhaustion.

"Zabuza's not dead," he rasped. "That hunter-nin was his accomplice. If you hit the right nerve points with senbon, you can simulate death. I realized what had happened too late."

Sakura bit her lip,

"So Sasuke-kun and Naruto are in danger?"

"Probably not today," Kakashi sighed. "The body takes a while to recover from that sort of paralysis."

"How long?"

"I think Genma said about a week." So most likely about the same amount of time that Kakashi was going to be out of commission. Convenient. He'd say almost say _too_ convenient, but he couldn't think of a single advantage someone could take from the situation. "Why are you still guarding Tazuna even though our mission is over?"

"He didn't ask us to, but we agreed that it was a fair trade for him feeding us and letting us stay in his house while you recover." Sakura paused and twisted her fingers together. "And, sensei, I've been to the village now, and they really do desperately need this bridge. They used to have a trade agreement with Kiri, but after Gato started running people out of business, Kiri just… stopped caring. The people… half of them are starving. It just doesn't seem right to stand back and do nothing."

Kakashi reached out a shaky hand and rested it on Sakura's arm.

"Sakura, I could take out that bridge by myself with ten well-placed, demolition-grade explosive tags – possibly less. We may be able to help them safely complete their bridge, but what they really _need_ is a permanent guard." Sakura's shoulders slumped, and she hung her head. Kakashi sighed. "We have to leave as soon as I'm able to travel again, but," Kakashi paused and knew that he was probably going to regret this decision even before he made it, "I suppose it wouldn't hurt for the three of you to keep guarding Tazuna-san and his crew until then. You're guarding the _people_ , though, _not_ the bridge. If something happens, you are to take the civilians and _run_."

Sakura looked up and smiled.

"Yes, Kakashi-sensei. Thank you."

"You'd probably just all sneak out and go protect the bridge anyway if I told you no," Kakashi muttered to himself. Sakura offered him an innocent grin but didn't deny it.

His team was going to cause so much trouble when they eventually made chuunin – he was looking forward to it. His nerves would probably be _dead_ by then, but he'd definitely enjoy watching the antics.

"I'll got let Tsunami-san know that you're awake so that she can make you some miso soup," Sakura announced, standing up. She paused when she reached the doorway. "Uh, Kakashi-sensei, I was wondering," she turned back to him, "um, just how old _are_ you?"

Kakashi frowned at her in confusion, wondering where that question had come from.

"Twenty-seven. Why?"

Sakura made a strange choking noise, and her face went red with embarrassment for some reason.

"Oh, no reason!" she squeaked. "I should really go see about that soup!" Then she rushed out of the room.

Kakashi frowned after her.

Huh. What had that been about?

* * *

Two hours and a cup of miso soup later, Sasuke and Naruto returned with Tazuna.

"Nii-san! You're awake!"

"Hey Naruto- _omph_!" Naruto's tackle hug nearly squashed Kakashi.

"Careful, dobe – you're going to knock him out again if you keep that up."

"Shut up, teme!"

Something eased in Kakashi's chest at the sight of the two boys whole and clearly uninjured.

"I'm glad you're both okay," he told them and awkwardly patted Naruto's back since Naruto clearly didn't have any plans to let go for a while.

Sasuke sat down on the floor a little distance from Naruto but still within easy reach of Kakashi.

"Sakura told us that Zabuza is still alive," Sasuke informed him. Kakashi nodded.

"People should really stay dead when they're defeated," Naruto grumbled and then gave Kakashi one last squeeze before sitting up.

"You're going to have to be extra careful," Kakashi told them. "I know that we haven't had much of a chance to go over chakra sensing, yet," Which would be changing the _instant_ they got back to Konoha, "but you're going to need to keep your senses wide open at all times."

"Don't worry, nii-san – we will!"

"I don't know – are we going to have time with you giving a motivational speech to every single person we meet?" Sasuke asked, his tone serious but a teasing tilt to his mouth.

"I did _not_ -!"

"The entire bridge crew. That fruit seller. Three different fishermen-"

"I was just _talking_ to them, you bastard! _Talking_."

"Sure you were."

Kakashi huffed a laugh,

"Just try to keep the revolutions to a minimum, Naruto."

"Nii-saaaaan!" Naruto whined.

"Do you know where my jounin vest got put?" Kakashi asked instead of teasing Naruto further.

"I'll get it." Sasuke stood and walked purposefully out of the room.

Naruto was quiet for a moment, his hands twisting in the hem of his jacket in a way that meant he was having a hard time putting words to his thoughts. Finally, he whispered,

"I completely lost it after you collapsed." He looked ashamed. "I- I didn't even think to check for a pulse. I just fell apart."

Kakashi held out one arm, and Naruto burrowed into his side, face hidden in shame.

"It was your first life or death battle. You held it together until after the fight was over. Most shinobi freeze at least once their first time out in the field, and that's usually just against regular bandits – not S-class missing-nin. You did a good job."

"And you pulled it together once Sakura reminded you to," Sasuke offered quietly from the doorway. He was holding Kakashi's jounin vest and staring at his feet. "You didn't come close to eviscerating our client."

Kakashi patted the empty space on the other side of the futon, and Sasuke shuffled over. He sat down, pulled his knees to his chest and hugged his legs.

"There's a reason you're supposed to work slowly up to taking A-rank missions." Kakashi stared up at the ceiling. He glanced toward the door and noticed an extra shadow on the floor. "They highly stressful, and if you haven't had time to build up to them, they can bring out and enhance the less desirable aspects of your personality. _All_ of you did admirably. I'm proud of all of you. You, too, Sakura." Sakura, caught in her eavesdropping, wandered in as well and settled on the blankets by Kakashi's feet. "You three saved my life. Thank you."

The four of them stayed like that quietly until Tsunami called that dinner was ready.

"What did you want your vest for anyway?" asked Naruto as he sat up.

"Oh, that." Kakashi reached out and snagged his vest from where Sasuke had set it on the floor. He dug tiredly through one of the inner pockets and produced a fistful of ryou. "Would one of you buy me some yeast and bread flour while you're at the market tomorrow? Or even all-purpose flour – I'm not that picky at this point."

* * *

Two days after waking up in Tazuna's house, Kakashi was balanced precariously on an old pair of wooden crutches and kneading bread dough like his life depended on it. Should he be up and about just, yet? No, probably not, but Kakashi had brought one book with him. _One_. And his team's C-rank escort mission had turned into an A-rank _nightmare_. An _on-going_ A-rank nightmare, and if Kakashi could, he would throw all three of his students over his shoulder and book it back to Konoha.

Yeah, so Kakashi was already on his second loaf of bread.

He really wished that he had his windowsill pictures with him to talk to. At least Tsunami had graciously leant him the use of her kitchen and oven. He couldn't experiment with recipes, though, because it was rude to set other people's ovens on fire.

"What's the point of sending them to guard the bridge? They'll just get killed."

The eight year old nihilist, however, Kakashi really could have done without. Nine year old? Ten? Kakashi wasn't really good at guessing ages between 'walking and talking' and 'Academy graduate.'

Kakashi didn't look over at Inari, because he was a little afraid that the movement would make him overbalance on his crutches.

"They're not guarding the bridge – they're guarding Tazuna-san and his building crew."

"So? You're still all going to die," the little boy muttered sullenly.

"Everybody dies eventually," Kakashi shrugged, "but, no, my team isn't going to die this mission." He fervently wished that Inari would leave.

"Heroes always die."

That brought Kakashi up short. He twisted on his crutches to look at Inari. The little boy was leaking around the eyes. Oh gods, small, crying child and nary a pork bun in sight.

Inari scrubbed at his face and glared at him.

"Are you going to yell at me for being a crybaby, too?" he demanded.

Ah. So _that_ was what Naruto had been shouting about last night. Kakashi still hadn't been deemed well enough to join everyone at the table at that point and had only caught the tail end of raised voices.

"Of course not." Kakashi carefully rearranged himself so that his back was leaning against the counter, his bread dough temporarily abandoned. "One of the bravest people I ever knew used to cry at the drop of a hat. There's nothing wrong with crying."

Inari blinked at him in surprise.

"But- But Naruto said-"

"It's all right to grieve." Kakashi glanced at the torn picture hanging by the kitchen table. He suspected the missing person was either Inari's father or older brother, and given the state of things in Wave Country, it was no stretch to guess that he'd died on Gato's orders. "The important thing is not to crawl down into the grave with the people we've lost. Visit, remember the good times, but don't stay. After all, it's how they lived that makes a person a hero – not their death."

Inari stared at him, eyes still leaking.

"How would you know?"

"I survived the Third Shinobi War. I've seen a lot of good people die."

"Did you cry?"

"Not at first. I tried to crawl into the grave after them. None of the people I lost would have wanted that for me." Kakashi eased away from the counter and turned back to his dough. The familiar, soft texture of bread dough beneath his fingers was soothing.

After a moment, small feet padded slowly over to him, and a small hand hesitantly curled into the hem of his shirt. Kakashi looked down at Inari. The boy was looking down, and the volume of leaking had increased greatly.

"Sometimes, it's really hard… to remember that there were good times," Inari whispered.

"Yeah," Kakashi agreed softly, "but eventually it gets easier." He looked at his bread dough, and then tore off a chunk and handed it to Inari. Inari accepted it with a frown.

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

"You knead it." Kakashi demonstrated. "I always find that it's better when I have something to do with my hands."

Inari rolled the ball of dough between his hands.

"This is what I always thought jellyfish ought to feel like," he decided. He prodded the dough across the countertop.

Kakashi glanced back at the kitchen entrance when he heard a floorboard creak. Tsunami was watching Inari from the doorway. She caught Kakashi's eye and gave him a small, grateful nod. Kakashi nodded back and then returned his attention to kneading.

He was really looking forward to this mission being over.

* * *

Two days later, Kakashi was off his crutches and walking steadily under his own power again. His chakra reserves were still depleted – just over half strength at best – but walking didn't require excessive amounts of chakra.

"We're leaving tomorrow," Kakashi informed his team at supper that night.

"But the bridge is almost done!" Naruto protested. "Tazuna says they have less than a day of work to go."

"We're days ahead of schedule," Tazuna agreed. "My crew has been working much better with your team guarding them."

"The daily motivational speech probably hasn't hurt either," Sasuke nodded mock seriously. Naruto tore a piece off of his bread roll and threw it at Sasuke. Sasuke just caught it and ate it.

"Nevertheless, we need to head back to Konoha tomorrow. Our mission is over," Kakashi sighed. "We'll take you as far as your bridge in the morning, Tazuna-san."

Tazuna nodded in understanding.

"Thank you. You and your team have done far more than I could have hoped. Gato is cheap and has no patience for failure. If we're lucky, he'll have fired that missing-nin and will wait a while before he tries anything else. Honestly, he'd profit more from trying to set up some sort of toll than by destroying the bridge."

Kakashi wasn't quite so optimistic, but for Tazuna and Wave Country's sake, he hoped the man was right.

* * *

The next morning Kakashi and Team 7 headed out with Tazuna after bidding Inari and Tsunami goodbye. Tsunami and Inari were heading out as well to visit one of her friends.

Kakashi was once again wearing his tanto on his back with his pack sealed in its scroll. He doubted he'd manage to relax until he and his team were safely back inside the gates of Konoha. He was going to hire his team for another D-rank at his bakery just so that he could keep an eye on them while also baking a bread mountain.

Pretty much _everyone_ in the village waved at Naruto as they passed through. Naruto waved back, Sasuke rolled his eyes, and Sakura just shook her head.

Kakashi's general feeling of unease continued to grow the closer to the bridge they got. He wished he could believe he was just being paranoid.

"It's awfully quiet," Tazuna muttered to himself as they arrived at the bridge. "I hope the crane's engine isn't malfunctioning again."

Kakashi already had his tanto unsheathed by the time they found the first unconscious member of the bridge crew.

"Take Tazuna and head back to the village," Kakashi ordered, but even as he spoke, unnaturally thick fog was rolling out to engulf the entire bridge. _Damn it_. "Never mind. Defensive formation. Do _not_ lose sight of each other."

Kakashi stabbed the water buunshin before he'd even fully, consciously registered its presence. He shoved his hitai-ate up. First opportunity he got, he was running Zabuza through with a chidori. He needed to finish this fight as quickly as possible and conserve chakra as much as possible, because he had no _idea_ what Zabuza's accomplice could do. Or if the little bastard carried poisoned senbon.

"Don't think you're going to catch me with the same trick twice, Hatake." Zabuza's voice seemed to boom out of the fog from every direction at once. "You can't copy what you can't see."

The fog was choked with chakra but… there was a subtle pattern to it. The way it shifted and swirled belied movement. Kakashi ducked just in time as Zabuza's sword cleaved through the air at neck height.

" _Suiryuudan no jutsu_."

Kakashi leapt out of the way as the massive, familiar water dragon. The jutsu crashed into the spot where Kakashi had been standing, cracked the concrete, and sent water sluicing from one edge of the bridge to the other.

Kakashi sent a gout of flame back in the direction the jutsu had come from. The fire burnt away some of the mist for a moment and illuminated two figures standing near the far railing, one tall and broad, the other small and lithe.

"The stage is set. After you, Haku."

"Thank you, Zabuza-sama."

The fog rolled back in, shrouding both figures once more. Kakashi had been right – where the chakra was densest in the fog was where Zabuza was. And dodging that water jutsu had put far more distance between Kakashi and his team than he was comfortable with. He spun back towards where he'd left his students and Tazuna just as Naruto's startled shout cut through the air. Zabuza was barring his way.

"Your team will be dead in a matter of minutes, Hatake. Your fight is with me." Not a buunshin, definitely the original this time, and his eyes were shut for some reason.

"Really? Fighting me with your eyes shut?" Kakashi asked in a flippant tone that he in no way actually felt. "Seems a touch arrogant." He thrust with his tanto but wasn't surprised when he was blocked.

"You're not going to catch me with that genjutsu eye of yours again, and I don't need my eyes to defeat you."

Huh. That seemed like overkill. Gai just watched Kakashi's feet to avoid his sharingan when they sparred. Then again, given the amount of chakra in this damn fog, Zabuza probably had a very detailed feel of everything that was happening on the bridge.

Behind Zabuza Sasuke's Grand Fireball jutsu lit the fog for a brief, eerie moment.

"Then I guess I'll just have to go through you." Kakashi disengaged blades, slapped a quick water jutsu into the puddles on the ground that would hopefully snag Zabuza's feet or at least slow him down a little, and then rolled out of the way as Zabuza's sword nearly bisected him. He really didn't want to engage in a lengthy sword battle – that would just be playing to his enemy's strengths. Zabuza _specialized_ in kenjutsu – Kakashi did not. He was probably a better long distance fighter than Zabuza was, though.

He whirled through a dizzying series of lightning and fire jutsus. When he'd finally put what he hoped was sufficient distance between himself and Zabuza, Kakashi replaced himself with a lightning buunshin and flipped over the railing. Have fun sticking a metal sword through _that_.

There was almost no fog below the bridge, and Kakashi raced along the underside towards his team. Somewhere overhead he heard Zabuza swear colorfully as he apparently electrocuted himself on the lightning buunshin. He could feel Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura's chakra signatures flaring almost directly above him. He swung himself back up over the railing-

And directly into the path of Zabuza's arcing blade.

Kakashi managed to shove himself back out into the open air far enough that the sword only tore through his vest and slashed a deep gouge in his chest instead of eviscerating him. A shuunshin landed him in a graceless sprawl in the center of the bridge.

 _Damn it_.

He rolled to his feet.

"Slowing down, Hatake? That chakra exhaustion finally catching up with you?" Zabuza sounded ever so slightly out of breath. Evidently Kakashi wasn't the only one feeling the effects of this battle. Kakashi's mind raced as he reminded his knees that they weren't allowed to wobble until the battle was over and his team was safe.

He just needed to keep Zabuza relatively still so that he wouldn't have to chase him down with a chidori and stretch things out even longer. Well, he did have the pack's mass summons scroll, and Zabuza's weapon _did_ have Kakashi's blood on it now. With a scent that strong, the fog wouldn't even slow his ninken down. It was worth a shot. The pack might only be able to keep Zabuza in place for five seconds, but that was more than double the time that Kakashi needed.

The scroll slipped easily from its pocket on the front of his vest thankfully unharmed. He smeared blood from his wound across it in one swift movement (that was definitely going to require stitches when this was all over), set his intentions clearly in his head, and then pressed the scroll against the ground.

Kakashi's sharingan caught the telltale swirl of fog, and he blocked Zabuza's sword with his tanto as it sliced through the air. In some ways, Zabuza was almost predictable. He was a brutal fighter but not the most creative one. Or perhaps that was just his style when he was fighting blind.

Kakashi proceeded to parry, block, and dodge, mostly trying to stall for time so that his ninken could find their opening. The fog was starting to dissipate a bit. It must be a tiring jutsu to maintain. Kakashi could just make out some sort of… domed structure? What the _hell_ was that? He'd never seen anything like it before. This fight needed to be over five minutes ago.

Kakashi danced back out of Zabuza's reach once more, and the pack chose that moment to attack. Zabuza's eyes snapped open in shock as teeth sank into his limbs. The fog was rolling back faster now, and Kakashi could see that his students and Tazuna appeared to be trapped in a structure made of _mirrors_. He didn't waste any breath on words.

His hands flew through the necessary seals, and then he sprang forward with a handful of screaming lightning. Kakashi pulled his hand back to strike-

Suddenly, it wasn't Zabuza in front of him anymore but a young, pale, delicately featured face surrounded by dark hair.

 _ **Rin**_ **.**

Kakashi's arm jerked left almost of its own accord. His hand plunged through bone and muscle. Hot blood splattered his face. Something hit the ground with a _thud_.

Kakashi's mind had gone numb.

"Gods damn it, Haku, you idiot! What were you thinking?!"

"Sorry… Zabuza-sama. I didn't… have time for senbon."

* * *

Far below the bridge a small fishing boat bobbed on the surface of the river. Its sole occupant stared up at the underside of the bridge.

Nori had heard the shouting and just now a sound like pane after pane of glass shattering. His hands tightened around his fishing net. In these parts such sounds of violence could only mean Gato. Someone was attacking the almost-completed bridge, but what could he do? He was just one man….

But he thought of his friend, Nashi, and her nearly empty fruit stall with its few wrinkled apples and bruised peaches. He thought of Tsurizao, who could no longer work after being crippled by one of Gato's goons. He thought of the children begging on the streets, whom he didn't even have enough to give a few small coins to. And he thought of the blond boy he'd met in the market whose words had radiated _hope_ and _belief_ and _conviction_ like the first sunrise after a decade of darkness.

Nori looked down at the trident lying in the bottom of his boat that he sometimes used to spear large, bottom feeding river fish. Maybe one ant couldn't harm a wasp, but an entire colony of ants could tear a wasp to pieces. He put down his net and picked up his oars.

This was _their_ home. _Their_ bridge. And he was _sick_ of watching his village die.

(And in the village square, two unconscious hired swordsmen had already been tied up, and the other ants were starting to swarm, the anger in their hearts finally burning past the fear of years to become courage.)

* * *

Zabuza shook off the pack with a mighty heave and leapt back from Kakashi with Haku tucked against his side. Haku's left arm remained behind on the concrete of the bridge, severed just above the elbow. Kakashi didn't even try to chase after them.

"Bandage that! Don't even _think_ about bleeding out!" There was the barest hint of hysteria underlying Zabuza's tone. "You're no use to me dead!"

A warm, furry face nudged Kakashi's slack hand.

"You with us, Boss?" asked Pakkun from where he was perched on Bull's head.

Kakashi blinked. Tried to shake off the mind-deadening haze.

"Yeah," he croaked. "Go protect my team. I'm going to try something while he's distracted."

"Something stupid?" asked Pakkun cynically. Before Kakashi could even respond, the pug sighed, "It's you – of course it will be. Let's go!"

Kakashi pressed his palm to his sharingan and concentrated as the pack ran to surround Team 7 and Tazuna. He desperately wanted to check on his students, but he needed to finish this _now_ while Zabuza was distracted, and he was only going to have one shot at this.

Zabuza was standing defensively on the front of Haku now, but he made no move to attack while Haku slowly wound bandage around the cauterized stump of his arm. He had his sword held in front of him almost like a shield.

Kakashi lowered his hand and focused his activated mangekyou.

The portal opened in the center of Zabuza's blade instead of his chest. _Damn it_. But he could work with that. Nothing threw a kenjutsu specialist quite like destroying their weapon.

"What the _hell_?!" Zabuza tried to yank his sword free of the portal's pull. Kakashi gritted his teeth and redoubled the chakra he was feeding to his mangekyou.

 _Tink_.

A hairline fracture shot through the metal as Zabuza desperately fought to save his weapon.

 _Tink. Tink. Tinktinktink._

The fractures were spreading and multiplying, radiating out from the edges of the swirling vortex.

 _CRACK._

Zabuza's sword shattered. Metal rang as pieces of the massive blade hit the ground.

Kakashi dropped to one knee as he lost hold of his mangekyou, and it swirled back into a normal sharingan. His head throbbed.

Zabuza gaped at the shattered remains of his sword.

Slow clapping broke the silence.

"Really, I don't know why I gave you a second chance after you failed the first time." A short man wearing sunglasses and carrying a cane was standing a little ways down the bridge. One of his arms was in a cast and- oh, there was the miniature chuunin army that Kakashi had been expecting since this mission had first gone wrong. This must be Gato. "What a waste of money you turned out to be. It turns out I can hire a whole _army_ of missing-nin for what you wanted to charge me. Consider yourself _fired_." Gato spotted Haku's arm lying on the bridge. "Ha! Lost an arm, did you? Serves you right for breaking mine!"

Zabuza stared at Gato with dangerously narrowed eyes.

"So you're not going to pay us?"

"Absolutely _not_."

"Just needed to be clear." Zabuza let the hilt of his ruined blade fall from his hand. "Hey, Hatake, lend me your sword."

Kakashi laboriously hauled himself to his feet.

"Why should I?"

"Because I'm not working for him anymore, and you _broke mine_."

"Fair enough." Kakashi unsheathed his tanto and tossed it to Zabuza hilt first. Zabuza snatched it from the air with ease.

Gato took a step back.

"You can't hurt me! I _own_ this place! I own this whole _country_!"

"Not anymore!" The shout came from behind Kakashi. He twisted around in surprise. What looked like the _entire_ village was standing just behind his wide-eyed students and Tazuna. Men and women were armed with tridents, fishing spears, boat hooks, pitch forks, sickles, and anything else that had been near at hand. Even Tsunami was standing in the front of the crowd brandishing a kitchen knife, and Inari had managed to get his hands on a crossbow that Kakashi highly doubted he knew how to use.

"You've taken our homes and our livelihoods!" shouted a man with a trident.

"Taken our loved ones!" yelled Tsunami.

"We're _done_ letting you take things," snarled another woman, raising her boat hooks.

"And you insulted Haku and broke our contract." Zabuza rolled his neck. "I'd say I can hurt you all I want."

Gato barely had time to scream as Zabuza lunged forward and killed him with a single swing of gleaming silver. He shredded his way through a quarter of the missing-nin Gato had hired before they realized what was happening and turned tail and ran. Zabuza let out a disgusted snort as he watched them flee.

"Amateurs." He turned back to Kakashi and tossed him back his tanto. "How do you fight with that piece of shit, Hatake? It's _tiny_."

Kakashi caught his sword and pulled his hitai-ate down over his sharingan with a shrug.

"I've got nothing to compensate for."

Zabuza ignored the insult and started fussing over Haku's one-handed bandaging job, though he'd probably stab anybody who pointed out the fussing for what it actually was.

"So they're not trying to kill us anymore?" asked Sakura. Her left arm was hanging limply at her side – presumably numb from the multiple senbon protruding from her shoulder – and she was limping. Behind her Naruto and Sasuke were also bristling senbon like porcupine quills and limping, but they were upright, and all their limbs were attached. Kakashi resolutely did not look down at where Haku's arm still lay. Sasuke's eyes were red and sporting a single tomoe each.

"No, they're not," Kakashi confirmed. "Status report?"

"Senbon _suck_ ," Naruto stated decisively. "But no significant injuries."

"My arm should be fine once we pull the senbon out," Sakura agreed.

"He didn't seem to be aiming for anything vital," added Sasuke. "Honestly, he didn't seem all that invested in killing us. Naruto almost had him talked to a standstill after I broke his mask."

"Motivational speech no jutsu is surprisingly effective," Sakura nodded. She pulled a senbon out of her thigh with a wince and let it clatter to the ground. Her right hand was shaking. Naruto's hands were trembling as well. Sasuke's hands were steady, but his face was ghostly white, making the scratches on his cheeks and his newly awakened sharingan standout even more lividly.

Kakashi wiped some of the blood off his tanto on his pants leg and re-sheathed it.

"Good work."

"Are _you_ okay, nii-san?" asked Naruto anxiously.

"Huh?"

"You're swaying," frowned Sasuke.

"And sort of dripping blood," Sakura pointed out.

And now that adrenaline and shock were starting to wear off… oh, yeah, his chest _was_ sort of blazing with pain, wasn't it? And his chakra reserves were desperately low again. Kakashi stared down at his bloody vest.

"I should probably bandage that," he mutter vaguely and then staggered slightly. Sasuke and Naruto each caught one of his arms and guided him over to the railing a few feet away from where Haku and Zabuza were. His legs folded inelegantly under him as he sat down. He pulled his storage scroll off his belt and unsealed his pack with a small burst of chakra.

"Naruto, help Sakura get those senbon out of her shoulder. Be gentle – they can cause damage on the way out as well as the way in. Sasuke, my med kit is in the front right pocket of my pack."

Kakashi eased out of his tanto strap and vest and gingerly wrapped gauze and bandage around his chest in a rough field dressing while his students helped de-senbon each other. He needed to put some stitches in but in the middle of an incomplete bridge surrounded by civilians wasn't exactly the best place to do that. He looked up to find Zabuza glaring at him.

"Why _aren't_ you in the Bingo Book?"

"I was sort of retired for a while there." Kakashi stared thoughtfully at Zabuza's unscored hitai-ate. "Why'd you decide to work for Gato?"

"Revolutions are fucking expensive."

"Right. You tried to depose the Mizukage," Kakashi nodded to himself.

"I tried to _kill_ the bastard. He's tearing apart my village from the inside out," Zabuza snarled.

"Have you ever considered starting your revolution on a smaller scale?" Kakashi asked, leaning himself back against the railing with a wince.

"How?"

"Well, these people certainly look ready for a revolution." Kakashi waved one hand vaguely at where the civilians where tossing the bodies of the dead missing-nin over the side of the bridge to drift out to sea and a watery, unmarked grave. "But they're not going to make it very far if they have to constantly worry about protecting their bridge. They may not be able to pay as well as Gato, but they won't stab you in the back either."

Zabuza gave the villagers a disdainful look, but before he could speak another thin, tired voice spoke up.

"Could we, Zabuza-sama?" Haku's eyes were dull with pain but hopeful. "I think I'd like that – protecting them."

Zabuza stared at Haku for a long moment. His eyes flicked to the space where Haku's arm should have been and then to some distant point out over the river.

"I'll think about it."

Haku smiled.

Metal jingled as Zabuza's sword started reassembling itself, and Kakashi was suddenly very glad for Gato's timely arrival.

"Hey, Kakashi-nii," Naruto piped up, "do we have to give Haku back his senbon or do we get to keep them?" He flourished a fistful of senbon.

"Under the circumstances, I think it's up to you, Naruto."

"I'm keeping mine," Sakura declared.

"You missed one." Sasuke pulled a senbon out of Sakura's half fallen out bun and handed it to her.

"Thanks, Sasuke-kun." She sighed. "I need to figure out a better way of pinning my hair – this just isn't working."

"I've always found that a cover works best," Haku told her, and Kakashi wondered just how much more surreal his life could get.

Sasuke handed his senbon to Haku.

"Shuriken are the best anyway."

"They are _not_!" Naruto protested hotly, also passing his senbon to Haku. "Kunai are _so much better_."

"I broke his mask with a shuriken."

"Yeah? Well, we couldn't have made that stretcher without _kunai_ , and I didn't see you blocking any senbon with _shuriken_ , teme!"

"If today has proven anything, it's that _senbon_ really are the best," disagreed Sakura.

"You want us to stick around, Boss?" asked Pakkun, sitting down next to Kakashi.

"I think we're good now. You can head back."

Pakkun huffed.

"Right." The pug watched for a moment as Sasuke, Naruto, and Sakura started debating weapons. "Looks like you're doing a good job with your pups so far."

Kakashi smiled to himself.

"Thanks."


	10. Chapter 10

The entirety of the Uchiha clan had neglected to ever mention that the sharingan could be this much of a _pain_. Sasuke's eyes kept activating at random moments and refusing to _de_ activate again. In the three days since they'd finally left Zabuza and Haku at Tazuna's house, it had happened _five times_. It was annoying and an area of the sharingan that Kakashi couldn't help him with.

"I _can't_ deactivate mine," he'd explained. "That's why I keep it covered."

So Sasuke now had a ton of really pointless moments _perfectly memorized_. And apparently the sharingan needed at least two tomoes before he could perfectly replicate the things he memorized. It was frustrating, but it also meant that Sasuke was the first one on Team 7 to notice Kakashi's slowly deteriorating health.

They had spent two additional days at Tazuna's house recovering from the battle on the bridge. Kakashi had spent most of the first day asleep while Zabuza grumbled under his breath about being fought to a standstill by a man who was practically half _dead_ , and then the second day he'd spent eating like there was no tomorrow. By the time they'd left, Kakashi had seemed tired but otherwise recovering quickly.

Three days later Kakashi was starting to look bruised under his visible eye, and his shoulders were hunched in discomfort. Sasuke wouldn't have noticed anything at all if he didn't have a picture perfect recollection of what Kakashi had looked like only an hour after they'd left. He wasn't sure if their sensei just wasn't sleeping well after everything that had happened (Sasuke knew _he_ wasn't after all) or-

Sasuke's eyes flicked down to the ruined front of Kakashi's jounin vest that Tsunami had done her best to stitch back together.

-if he wasn't healing properly.

Sasuke had caught a brief glimpse of the ragged stitches that Kakashi had referred to as an 'ANBU patch job.' He didn't know more than the incredibly basic first aid that they'd learned at the Academy, but even he didn't think that those stitches would last well. And he was… he was _worried_ , damn it! Sasuke didn't like not knowing for certain what was wrong, and they'd already watched Kakashi nearly die _twice_ on this mission. He'd already lost too many people that he cared about. He couldn't _stand_ the thought of potentially losing another.

Naruto and Sakura didn't seem to have noticed anything was wrong, yet. Maybe the sharingan was making him jump at shadows? He'd have to keep an eye on things.

Sasuke nearly swore as he accidentally activated his sharingan yet again. If he hadn't seen Kakashi in action these past two weeks, he'd be starting to suspect that his clan's gekkei genkai was highly overrated.

* * *

The next day Kakashi was definitely looking worse. A touch of a flush was peaking above the edge of his mask, and he actually stumbled over a rock on the road. He wasn't walking any more slowly, but he'd been practically lethargic when they'd stopped for lunch. Naruto and Sakura were starting to shoot him worried looks as well.

Sasuke didn't like it, and he didn't know how to _fix_ it which he liked even less.

They were still sleeping in shifts, so that night once his watch was over Sasuke woke Sakura as well as Naruto.

"Ngh, the sun isn't up, yet," Sakura groaned, pulling her blanket over her face.

"Team meeting," Sasuke whispered.

Sakura pushed her blanket back down again and sat up with a frown. Naruto was already rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

"What is it?" Sakura asked softly. "And why aren't you waking up Kakashi-sensei, too?"

"Because Kakashi-sensei is the one I'm worried about."

All three of them looked over to where Kakashi was sleeping fitfully. Sasuke suspected that, under normal circumstances, their whispering would have woken him up.

Naruto hugged himself.

"Me, too," he admitted.

"I think his wound might be getting infected," Sakura agreed, her eyes worried in the banked glow of the fire. "We should make it back to Konoha tomorrow, right?"

Sasuke nodded,

"As long as we don't slow down too much, we ought to be there just before supper."

"I think we should skip reporting into Hokage-jiji and just take Kakashi-nii straight to the hospital," Naruto muttered. He paused, and a thoughtful look settled onto his face. "Hey Sakura-chan, is your arm still numb?"

Sakura grimaced.

"Not my whole arm, but it still sort of feels like some of my fingers are missing, and I'm getting pins and needles in my elbow. According to Haku, that should be wearing off soon, though. What are you thinking?"

"Kakashi-nii isn't always the best about his own health, because he really hates hospitals, but if we say we want to get your arm checked out before we report in, he definitely won't say no. And once we get him through the front doors, the med-nin definitely won't let him leave without a checkup."

"Won't he catch on?" asked Sasuke.

"Probably," Naruto shrugged, "but he's not going to put up a fight, because Sakura-chan's arm is a legitimate concern."

"And if his fever gets worse, he might actually _not_ notice," Sakura added. She wiggled her left hand fingers sluggishly and frowned at them. "After this plan, one of you gets to be the decoy next, though."

* * *

Kakashi was so glad that they were almost back to Konoha. He'd been changing his bandages, but the wound in his chest was definitely infected. ANBU patch jobs were supposed to hold up to a couple of days of hard travel until you could reach a proper medic. Kakashi had been hoping that this one might last longer with an easier pace of travel but evidentially not. Tazuna's village hadn't had a proper doctor, and Kakashi was much better at putting stitches in other people than himself despite his unfortunate amount of practice.

He was definitely running a fever, and he ached all over. It was straight to the hospital for him as soon as they had finished reporting in. Kakashi grimaced at the thought. He really hoped that this could be fixed with a quick bout of chakra healing, so that he could get home to his kitchen and his oven. His old nightmares about Rin's death were back with a vengeance as well as the ones about the Kanabi Bridge mission (though featuring the exciting new twist that now it was sometimes one of his students trapped under the rock instead of Obito). He had so much bread he wanted to bake.

He really missed his bakery.

"Hey Sakura-chan, how's your arm doing?" Naruto asked, arms folded behind his head as he walked.

"Tingly. And it still feels like I only have a thumb and index finger on that hand."

Sasuke looked at her contemplatively.

"You should probably get that checked just to make sure there's no nerve damage."

Sakura winced at the thought.

"Hey nii-san," Naruto turned to Kakashi, "our mission wasn't super important to the village, right?"

"All missions are important to the village, but ours wasn't exactly critical, no."

"Then it would be okay for us to get Sakura-chan's arm checked before we report in, right? It's not like our mission was time sensitive."

Kakashi considered this and glanced over at Sakura. She was staring down at her left hand, the anxiety clear on her face. Honestly, he'd feel better if they got Sakura's arm checked, too. He didn't like how long it was taking her to recover.

"That would probably be a good idea," Kakashi agreed.

He realized he'd been played about halfway through the hospital's front doors. A hand closed on each of his arms, and Kakashi found himself being towed forward by Naruto and Sasuke as Sakura marched up to the front desk.

"I need my arm and shoulder checked for nerve damage, and we think that Kakashi-sensei's wound is infected," she informed the kunoichi behind the desk. At the mention of his name, every medic in the room turned to look at Kakashi like sharks scenting blood.

Yikes.

"I was planning to come straight over to the hospital as soon as we reported in, you know," he told Naruto and Sasuke but didn't resist as they continued to tug him forward.

"You were swaying when we got through the gates. Jiji can wait."

Sasuke nodded in agreement.

A med-nin strode up to Kakashi, swept a critical eye over him, and then held a palm full of diagnostic chakra to the right side of Kakashi's face. The med-nin frowned.

"Could we get a gurney over here?" he called.

Kakashi tried to back up, but Sasuke and Naruto held him firmly in place.

"That's overkill, isn't it?" he protested. "I definitely need my stitches redone, but I can walk just fine."

"Whether you _can_ walk or not isn't the issue. You're suffering from chakra exhaustion and running a high fever – you shouldn't _be_ walking." The med-nin pointed at the blood stained front of Kakashi's vest. "When did that happen?"

"A week ago," volunteered Sasuke. "And he'd already been recovering from chakra exhaustion for a week before that."

The med-nin's eyes narrowed, and Kakashi grimaced. So much for not being admitted to the hospital.

"Don't worry, sensei," Sakura had joined them again, "we'll come back and keep you company after we report in."

Naruto patted his arm.

"You took care of us. Now we're taking care of you."

Kakashi sighed.

"You're all menaces," he told them matter-of-factly, but his words were fond.

Sasuke crossed his arms,

"We're shinobi – it's a job requirement."

There was a brief moment of silence. Naruto goggled at Sasuke.

"Teme… did you just… make a joke?"

"Hn."

"You did! You totally did!" Naruto crowed happily.

"Shut up, dobe."

Kakashi reluctantly climbed onto the gurney when it arrived.

* * *

A relatively short while later Kakashi was ensconced in a hospital bed and hooked up to an IV of antibiotics and fluids. His wound had been cleaned out and properly closed, and he'd been promised some chakra healing to speed things along once the infection was cleared up and the swelling had gone down. (Chakra healing worked best on fresh wounds.)

Kakashi shifted, trying to find a more comfortable position. The kids had probably been right to just take him straight to the hospital. Now that the mission was officially over and he was lying down, even the thought of sitting up almost seemed too much. He was exhausted down to his bones, and his head was swimming with fever. He wondered whether it was worth the effort of sitting up to retrieve the spare blanket from the end of his bed. His hospital scrubs were thin, and the surgical mask he'd been given to wear left his neck uncomfortably chilly and bare.

There was a knock on his door. Kakashi rolled his head to the side just in time to see Iruka come in carrying a stack of library books.

"Hey." Kakashi offered him a tiny wave that was really more a flopping of one hand.

"Hey yourself." Iruka set the books down on Kakashi's side table. "I sent your team home and told them to wait until morning to come visit, so they should be here in about half an hour." He pulled a chair over and sat down. "I also stopped by your apartment and picked up one of your spare eyepatches."

"Thanks."

Iruka was quiet for a moment while Kakashi slowly secured his eyepatch in place.

"We haven't done this in a while," he finally murmured.

"No," Kakashi agreed. He shot Iruka a wry look, "I figured I was safe until they at least made chuunin." Iruka snorted. "Maaa, I know – it was uncharacteristically optimistic of me."

"I think your team has officially made the Top Ten List of Most Disastrous First-Time-Out-of-the-Village Missions."

Kakashi closed his eye with a grimace.

"They nearly died," he whispered.

A hand settled on his shoulder.

"But they didn't. And now you have three overprotective little hellions who would go through hell or high water to make sure that they don't lose you either. I thought that they were going to start threatening the Sandaime when it was suggested that perhaps it would have been wiser to turn back as soon as it became apparent that the mission's danger level had been lied about."

Kakashi huffed and opened his eye again.

"In retrospect, I really should have aborted the mission."

"No recriminations. You did the best you could with the information you had at the time. You all made it back to Konoha, and your students, at least, even managed to do so in one piece."

Kakashi sighed softly and changed the subject.

"How's Ukki-san doing?"

"Foaming away like a happy yeast culture." Iruka started sorting through the books he'd brought. "So I assume you can't sit up at the moment-"

"Not really, no."

"-so which of these am I reading to you? And, fair warning, it's not any of the romance novels."

" _Aw_ , but I'm sick."

"No. You can read those on your own time. Think of it as motivation to heal faster."

* * *

Sasuke jerked awake from yet another nightmare with a gasp. He sat up in bed and wiped the sweat off his forehead. That was the third one tonight. He glanced at his alarm clock. Just after one o'clock.

Damn it.

Sasuke rolled out of bed. He hated his room at night, and he doubted he was going to managed anymore sleep. To hell with this.

Sasuke started rummaging through a drawer for clean clothes.

He was going out.

* * *

 _Lightning crackled in his hand, and blood was splattered across his face. A pale, young face smiled up at him._

" _It's okay, sensei. It was only an arm."_

Kakashi's eye snapped open. That was a new one.

He took a slow, deep breath in through his nose and breathed out through his mouth. Fever induced nightmares were always some of the worst. Kakashi continued to breathe in and out slowly, trying to calm his hammering heart.

A soft sound caught his ears.

He wasn't alone. And it was still pitch black outside. Had Tenzou stopped in after a late patrol?

Kakashi shifted his head.

Sasuke was curled up in one of the chairs next to his bed.

Kakashi blinked.

"Couldn't sleep?" he rasped. He didn't point out that visiting hours had ended long ago. They lived in a shinobi village – visiting hours were more of a suggestion than anything else.

Sasuke started slightly.

Silence stretched out, and just as Kakashi was beginning to think he wouldn't get any response at all or at best a noncommittal 'Hn,' Sasuke admitted,

"No."

"I'm not doing so well on that front either," Kakashi agreed.

Sasuke looked away.

"It was just… too quiet."

"Mmm," Kakashi nodded. He wondered if Sasuke had come in the hospital's main entrance or just snuck in through the window. Probably the window. "Sasuke," he waited until his student was looking at him again, "do you actually _want_ to be living in the Uchiha District?"

Sasuke blinked.

"Where else would I go?"

Kakashi stopped himself from shrugging just in time. That would have hurt.

"Your own apartment. Or, if you really wanted, I could put you up at the Hatake estate for a while – I don't use it. You own the Uchiha District – it's not going anywhere without your explicit say-so and a lot of paperwork – but nothing requires you to _live_ there unless you want to."

Sasuke stared at him for a long time, dark eyes wide and haunted. When he finally spoke, his voice was a barely audible whisper.

"I don't."

"We can start looking at options once I get out of the hospital," Kakashi murmured. The adrenaline of his nightmare was wearing off, and he was exhausted again. His eyelid drooped.

Just as he was drifting back to sleep, he heard Sasuke whisper,

"Thanks, sensei."

* * *

Sasuke was still curled in the hospital chair watching Kakashi breathe as the first gray of false dawn started to lighten the sky. As long as he could see that Kakashi was breathing, he knew for sure his sensei wasn't dead and he hadn't lost another person. Also, as long as he was in Kakashi's hospital room, Sasuke didn't have to be alone, and he could justify it to himself as standing guard.

There was a soft scraping sound at the window. Sasuke stiffened and then relaxed as he saw that it was just Naruto letting himself in. Naruto wordlessly picked up one of the other visitor's chairs and set it next to Sasuke's. He didn't look like he'd slept much. Neither of them spoke, and Kakashi didn't stir.

Outside the window the sky lightened and brightened to true dawn, and the sun began its slow climb.

Two minutes after visiting hours officially began, the door gently opened to admit Sakura. She collected the last chair and joined them. After a few minutes, she leaned her head against Naruto's shoulder.

In the silent presence of his teammates and sensei, Sasuke slowly drifted back to sleep. If there were any more nightmares, he didn't remember them when he woke up.

* * *

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" asked Sakura dubiously. The bag of groceries in her arms wasn't heavy, but its bulkiness made it awkward to carry. At least the lingering tingling and numbness in her left arm from Haku's senbon was finally gone. (During the little sleep she'd gotten the previous night, she'd fallen asleep with her left arm above her head, and when she had woken up it had felt heavy, numb, and unresponsive again due to being left at such an awkward angle for so long. It had scared her more badly than she would have expected.)

"Sure it is!" Naruto assured her cheerfully. "It's a team building exercise!"

"Does Kakashi-sensei actually know we're using his kitchen?" asked Sasuke, shifting his hold on his own bag of groceries.

"Well, yeah – I asked first," Naruto shrugged as he pulled a key out of his pocket. "He just said that if we get his hot water cut off, we'll be running laps of the village until our legs fall off."

Sakura and Sasuke both winced.

"Well, curry isn't that hard at least," Sakura muttered.

Naruto nodded.

"Iruka-sensei taught me his recipe. It's really good, and if we run into any major problems, he lives just down the hall." Naruto unlocked the door and then pressed his palm to the wood to deactivate whatever security seals Kakashi used. "Kakashi-nii hates hospital food, so this will make him really happy."

Sakura trailed after her teammates into their sensei's apartment. She wasn't entirely certain what she'd been expecting Kakashi's apartment to look like, but she supposed she would have pictured something a little more Spartan. Or possibly flour to be liberally coating everything since their mission to Wave Country was the first time she'd ever seen Kakashi entirely flour smudge free. Instead, Kakashi's apartment appeared to be exactingly neat with touches of personality that softened it. Three bookcases stood against one wall. The first was entirely filled with cookbooks – no surprise there – and the first three shelves of the second bookcase were filled with books in a variety of sherbet colors that mostly likely meant they were romance novels. The remaining space in the bookcases was taken up with a bewildering variety of fiction and non-fiction. A striped green and cream blanket was thrown over the back of the couch, and a few smooth, fist-sized, gray rocks sat clustered on a side table. There was also a crayon drawing in various shades of orange hung on one wall. It appeared to depict a frog with some sort of sword or stick dancing in a hail of shuriken. Or maybe a cloud of deformed butterflies. Sakura was going to go ahead and guess that Naruto had drawn that.

"Kitchen's in here!" Naruto called.

Sakura realized that she was gawking but didn't feel too guilty, because Sasuke had been, too.

When they reached the kitchen, Naruto was standing on a counter and grumbling about tall people who put important things on the top shelf. Sasuke snorted in amusement, set down his bag of groceries, and began looking through the cupboards for pots. Sakura started unpacking the groceries they'd brought.

Something bright red caught Sakura's eye, and when she turned her head, she found herself staring at a very familiar, mischievous grin. It was Naruto's 'Ha! Gotcha!' smile that generally put in an appearance after a successful prank, but it wasn't on Naruto's face. It was on the face of a woman with long red hair holding the Hokage hat in one hand. Sakura blinked and then asked before she could think better of it,

"Naruto, is that your mom?" Because if you ignored the eye and hair color, the woman looked spookily similar to Naruto.

There was a moment of dead silence in the kitchen, and Sakura belatedly hoped that she hadn't asked a horribly insensitive question.

" _What_?" Naruto hopped down off the counter, and Sasuke straightened up from the cupboard he'd been peering into.

Sakura twisted her hands together for a second and then pointed at the woman in the picture.

"It just- Well, she has the _exact_ same smile as you, and I've never seen that outside of families before."

"Oh, that's Kushina, the Red Hot-Blooded Habanero. She was a super badass kunoichi and married the Yondaime." Naruto pointed at another photo that Sakura hadn't noticed. "Kakashi-nii has been telling me stories about them for years."

The other picture Naruto had indicated was definitely an old team photo and… woah. Yeah, that was definitely the Yondaime. The Yondaime… who had spiky blond hair and blue eyes.

Sakura's head swiveled from the man with Naruto's hair and coloring to the woman with Naruto's smile and face, who had apparently married him. Sakura's brain went blank with shock.

"Holy shit." Sasuke turned from the pictures to stare at Naruto. "You're the Yondaime's son." Evidently he'd come to the same conclusion as Sakura.

"No, I'm not, teme. Don't be crazy. I… I…." Naruto glanced at the pictures, and the palpable longing on his face was painful to witness. "You- you really think so?" he finally asked, voice soft and hesitant.

Sakura nodded vigorously,

"You look far too similar to both of them for it to be a coincidence."

"But… why wouldn't-?" Naruto looked lost, and Sakura reached out and pulled him into a hug, because he looked like he really needed one. "Thanks, Sakura-chan," he mumbled into her shoulder.

Sasuke patted Naruto awkwardly on the back when Sakura finally released him.

"Come on, dobe – let's make curry and then go interrogate Kakashi-sensei while he's still trapped in a hospital bed and can't get away."

Naruto let out a slightly watery laugh,

"I think Hokage-jiji might be the one who needs an interrogation, but asking Kakashi-nii would probably be a good start."

* * *

Kakashi stared at the ceiling of his hospital room. He had started reading one of the novels Iruka had left him, but he'd run out of energy. IV antibiotics were the worst. Okay, not the _worst_ , but Kakashi definitely hadn't missed them. They always left him feeling even more drained than he already was. The chakra exhaustion wasn't helping and had probably contributed to his wound getting infected in the first place, too.

The door of his hospital room rattled and then swung open. Kakashi turned his head to see Sasuke, Sakura, and Naruto filing in. They were carrying a bag each, but Sakura seemed concerned, Sasuke had a look of grim determination on his face, and Naruto appeared to be a strange combination of hopeful and upset. Had something happene-?

"Is Naruto the Yondaime's son?" Sasuke demanded before Kakashi had a chance to say anything.

"Subtle, Sasuke-kun," Sakura sighed. "Remember? The plan was to be _subtle_."

 _Finally_.

"I can neither confirm nor deny that Naruto is related to Minato-sensei," Kakashi told them, "and it's definitely not because of a ridiculous order that would get me into a bunch of trouble if I did."

Naruto's eyes widened in comprehension, and Sakura nodded.

"So that's a yes," she stated decisively.

Sasuke nudged Naruto with an elbow,

"Told you."

"How was I supposed to know? Also, your interrogation skills _suck_ , teme – believe it!" Naruto's expression had gone from upset to thrilled, though, which was a relief. "Oh, _wow_! My parents are-!"

"Please don't shout S-class secrets in my hospital room, Naruto," Kakashi interrupted. "I'll get in trouble."

"That reminds me! We made you curry!" Naruto waved enthusiastically at the bags they were carrying.

"Thank you. …You didn't set my kitchen on fire did you?" Kakashi had been wondering why Naruto had wanted to borrow his kitchen for a 'team building exercise.'

" _No_ ," Naruto protested indignantly. "Only _you_ do that!"

"It's one of the perks of having your name on the lease," Kakashi nodded and attempted to prop himself up on one elbow without pulling the stitches in his chest. His head spun. Ugh – fever and low chakra were not a good combination.

Sakura immediately came over to help him. Naruto and Sasuke started rearranging chairs and the side table, because apparently 'We made you curry' was actually code for 'We're having team dinner in your hospital room,' and Kakashi was perfectly fine with that.

These kids – Kakashi wouldn't trade them for the world.

In fairly short order, Kakashi was propped up in bed with a couple of pillows and the curry and rice had been unpacked.

Sakura pulled a brand new box of chopsticks out of the bag Naruto had been carrying. She handed a pair to Kakashi.

"How is it that you don't have _any_ chopsticks that match, sensei?"

"That is a question that I have been asking myself for _years_ ," Kakashi told her. He accepted the chopsticks and bowl of rice and curry that Sasuke was holding out to him. It smelled like Iruka's recipe.

Kakashi hesitated a fraction of a second, then casually reached up, pulled off the surgical mask he was wearing, and tried a bite of the curry.

There was a clatter as Sakura dropped her box, and chopsticks went rolling across the linoleum floor. Kakashi looked up and wished that he could use his sharingan to memorize Sakura and Sasuke's gob-smacked expressions.

"What?" he asked innocently.

At the foot of the bed Naruto cackled with laughter.

"You've been hiding your face from us for _months_ , and all that was under that mask was a _mole_?! Naruto told us you had _fangs_!" Sakura was waving her arms and shouting.

"What the _hell_ , sensei?!" Sasuke agreed.

Kakashi just smiled to himself and took another bite of curry.

You didn't need to wear a mask around family.

* * *

 _A/N: Hey folks! So I have good news and bad news. Let's get the bad news out of the way first - the tendonitis in my wrists is acting up, making it painful for me to type. Because of this, it's going to be a while before you get the next chapter. I don't want to push things and run the risk of ending up in matching wrist braces again. I can make no promises on when the next chapter will be appearing, but have no fear - I adore this story and I will be back. The good news is that writing long hand doesn't bother my wrists like typing does, and every single chapter of this story is hand written long before it is typed up and edited, so while I might not be posting new chapters, I will be writing them. The other good news is that, because I won't being trying to write new chapters, type up old chapters, skim old episodes to remind myself how certain things were/weren't addressed in canon, and go to work, this is going to greatly increase the possibility that this story will continue on into Shippuden territory. No guarantees, yet - I'd really like to go there, but it's going to take a lot more work and planning than writing this story pre-time skip._

 _Thank you all for your patience and understanding, and hopefully I will be back with new chapters sooner than expected!_


	11. Chapter 11

_A/N: Hi everybody! I'M BACK! Thank you all so much for all your support and wonderful reviews! They mean the world to me. My wrists are doing much, much better, though updates will be slow so that I don't overdo it and put myself right back into the same boat again._

 _And now, without any further delay, let's get this show back on the road!_

* * *

Sasuke liked his new apartment. It was smaller than he was used to, but there wasn't a single surface in it that he could point to and trace a remembered bloodstain. It was wholly free of ghosts.

He hadn't brought much with him from his parents' house. Mostly just his clothes, weapons, team photo, and a few odds and ends. He'd taken the one framed photo in the house that featured only his mother, but for now he was keeping her in a drawer. He hadn't wanted to leave her behind, but at the same time, he wasn't ready to see her smiling at him every day. It still hurt too much.

Sasuke had finished unpacking his things last night. He couldn't remember the last time he'd slept so well. Kakashi had promised to stop by that morning and help him set up some security seals. For now, Sasuke was wandering around his tiny kitchen considering the issue of breakfast.

There was a rap on his living room window. He looked up to find Naruto cheerfully waving at him. He was holding some sort of potted plant. Sasuke opened the window and stood aside to let Naruto in.

"Morning, teme! It's really cool that we're living in the same building now!"

"We share a wall," Sasuke pointed out. "It probably would have been easier to just walk ten feet down the hall than to go out the window."

"Where's the fun in that?" Naruto shrugged. "Anyway, I brought you a housewarming present!" He proudly held out the potted plant.

Sasuke accepted it with a raised eyebrow.

"What is it?"

"Basil. It smells really nice, and you can chop it up and put it on all those tomatoes you eat."

Sasuke had never kept a plant before. He gave the leaves an experimental sniff. They did smell rather nice.

"Thanks, dobe." He set the basil plant down on his side table next to his copy of their team photo. Then he frowned. "Why does the side of the pot say, 'Midori-san?'"

"'Cause that's its name," Naruto told him like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Before Sasuke had a chance to ask _why_ the basil _needed_ a name, Naruto had already changed the subject. "I don't get why nobody has ever wanted this to live here." Naruto shoved his hands in his pockets as he looked around. "I mean, I know the building's hot water can be a little dicey, but otherwise it's pretty nice."

Sasuke couldn't fathom it either. The only explanation he could come up with was that it had something to do with the strange dislike that most civilians had for Naruto. He didn't get it. Sure, Naruto could be loud and something of a hot-head, but that hadn't seemed to bother any of the villagers in Wave Country. On occasion during D-ranks, when Kakashi had been out of earshot for one reason or another, people had made nasty comments. It pissed Sasuke off.

Someone knocked on the door, interrupting Sasuke's thoughts.

Sasuke opened the door to find Kakashi and Sakura standing on the other side.

"Yo."

"Good morning, Sasuke-kun!"

Sasuke blinked at them.

"Good morning?"

"We brought breakfast," Sakura smiled. "Don't worry – I cooked it, not Kakasi-sensei."

Kakashi let out a long-suffering sigh,

"I _can_ cook, you know."

"We've seen the scorch marks on your kitchen ceiling, sensei," Sakura sniffed primly.

Sasuke looked from Kakashi and Sakura in his doorway to Naruto standing in his living room.

"You all planned this, didn't you?" He stepped aside to let Kakashi and Sakura in.

"It's a housewarming party!" Naruto beamed.

"This is for you." Sakura handed Sasuke a neatly folded blanket. It was deep purple with a pattern of pale green shuuriken. Sasuke appreciated that she hadn't made any attempt to wrap it. "I'll admit that shuuriken make a nice pattern even if senbon are still the best."

Kakashi quickly offered the brown paper bag he was carrying before Sakura's comment could spark off yet another weapons debate.

"Fresh loaf of that sun-dried tomato bread," he told Sasuke and then held up the stack of seal transfer papers in his other hand, "and those security seals I promised you."

His team was ridiculous, Sasuke decided. He was glad that he hadn't ended up with anyone else.

* * *

Sakura was manning the front counter of the Ryouken Bakery. She didn't have to be. It was Saturday, and this wasn't a mission, but ever since they'd gotten back from Wave Country and Kakashi-sensei had been released from the hospital, she'd just found herself wandering over to the bakery every Saturday morning. It just felt… safe. Peaceful. She was starting to understand why Naruto and Sasuke liked it there so much.

Slowly, Sakura twisted a senbon through her fingers. They hadn't worked with senbon much at the Academy, but she'd always found the whole concept of them appealing. Since they'd returned from Wave Country, Sakura had started practicing with senbon regularly. It would be a while before she was good enough to use them reliably on missions, but it was a good goal to work towards. Besides, if she dipped them in paralytic or poison, she could afford to be a little less accurate to start.

The front door suddenly burst open, and Sakura nearly dropped her senbon.

"MY MOST ESTEMED RIVAL! MY TEAM HAS RETURNED FROM A SUCCESSFUL BORDER PATROL AND REQUIRES CELEBRATORY ANPAN!"

Sakura's first thought was 'green.' Her second though was 'eyebrows.' Her third was 'Maybe sensei tried to retire, because he was too sane.'

The bizarrely dressed jounin blinked at Sakura in surprise.

There was a rustle of curtain behind Sakura.

"Gai, what have I told you about shouting in my bakery?" Kakashi asked as he came out wiping his hands on his apron.

"Ah, forgive me, Kakashi – I was overcome with Youth." The strange jounin, Gai, waved a hand at Sakura. "Have you finally seen sense and hired some help instead of merely relying on shadow clones?"

"Not a chance," Kakashi told him cheerfully. "This is Sakura Haruno. She's a member of my gennin team."

Three more shinobi had wandered in behind Gai – two boys and a girl. Sakura thought that they looked about a year older than her.

"Hi Gai-san!" called Naruto cheerfully as he emerged from the kitchen, Sasuke following behind him. "Hey Bushy Brows! Hey Ten-Ten-san!"

"Hello Naruto-kun!" called one of the boys, the one who looked sort of like a miniaturized version of Gai. "I'm glad to see your Youthful Spark is still burning brightly! How was your first C-rank mission?"

Naruto offered him a big grin and a thumbs up.

"It was a total disaster! Our client lied about the danger level, and we got jumped by S-class missing-nin – twice!" He rubbed the back of his head. "So I guess I technically still haven't been on a C-rank, but we did survive our first A-rank okay."

Sakura hadn't thought of it that way before, but Naruto was right. She really hoped that their next C-rank mission _stayed_ a C-rank mission.

The Gai clone's mouth was hanging open as were the mouths of his teammates. Gai himself looked horrified.

"I've officially beaten your record of four months to destroy a new jounin vest," Kakashi informed Gai casually, shoving his hands in his pockets. Gai moved so fast that Sakura didn't even see a _blur_. " _Gack!_ Gai, I'm fine! Put me down!" Kakashi flailed, desperately trying to escape Gai's octopus hug and weeping. Kakashi's feet weren't actually touching the ground, and his arms were pinned to his sides.

"Always so Cool and Hip! Wait here a moment, my cute students – my Eternal Rival and I need to talk."

"We do _not_. I already talked to Iruka!" Kakashi was still struggling as Gai hauled him through the curtain. Not long after, the kitchen's back door clanked shut.

"Are they always like that?" asked Sakura.

"Yup," Naruto nodded, looking completely un-phased.

"Gai-sensei is a brilliant shinobi, but he can be kind of intense," agreed the girl, whom Sakura thought was probably Ten-Ten.

* * *

Kakashi had stopped struggling by the time they got outside, resigned to his fate. Gai set him down carefully on his feet.

"Now, in all honesty with no Youthful ears listening, how are you doing?" Gai asked with a level of seriousness that he usually reserved for training and missions. Kakashi wasn't getting out of this.

Kakashi slumped against the back wall of the bakery. He and Gai rarely had these conversations, but they'd started cropping up occasionally since Kakashi had left ANBU.

"I purposefully ruined five loaves of bread as soon as they released me from the hospital," Kakashi reluctantly admitted, "so I've been better."

"Nightmares?"

Kakashi hesitated, but he knew that once this conversation was over Gai wouldn't bring up the topic again.

"Haven't been this bad since I switched to the reserves. I think they're starting to slow down again, though."

Gai nodded.

"I've already watched you nearly lose yourself once to darkness. I never wish to do so again."

Kakashi looked away. Honestly, Gai and his melodramatic grand statements.

"Not going to happen." Kakashi paused and then added, "Unless, of course, something happens to my bakery. In which case, I have every intention of becoming a missing-nin, starting my own terrorist organization, recruiting my team, and burning the world to the ground." He gave Gai a cheerful eye smile.

Gai rolled his eyes.

"Always so Hip and Cool," he grumbled. "Shall we spar tomorrow at Training Field 12, my Rival?"

Kakashi straightened up, relieved that the topic of emotions was once again closed.

"Sounds like a plan. Now let's get back inside before Sasuke and Neji kill each other. I don't think Sasuke's going to respond any better to Neji's ideas about 'fate' and 'destiny' than Naruto."

Neji and Sasuke were glowering at each other when Kakashi and Gai made it back to the front of the bakery. Naruto and Lee were chatting amiably about taijutsu katas, and Sakura and Ten-Ten were apparently bonding over senbon.

"We should train together tomorrow!" Ten-Ten was enthusing. "I haven't worked on my senbon throwing in _ages_ , and I really shouldn't be letting it slide."

"I'm not very good, yet."

"That's fine. Neither of my teammates are all that interested in weapons outside of the basics, and it's always more fun to train with other people."

"Okay."

"I have returned, my adorable students!" Gai announced grandly, arms flung wide. Kakashi rolled his eye.

"We missed you, Gai-sensei!" piped up Lee, tears in his eyes.

"He was gone for five minutes," Neji told him, eyes narrowed and unimpressed.

Kakashi busied himself retrieving Team Gai's usual order from the display cabinet as Gai handed Sakura the appropriate amount of ryou.

"See you tomorrow, Sakura-san!" Ten-Ten waved as they left.

Kakashi's sensitive ears just caught Lee saying, "Sakura-san is so cute! Do you think she'd-," before the door closed behind them.

* * *

Naruto stared down at the perfectly bisected leaf in his hand.

"I did it," he whispered. Then he held the pieces of leaf aloft and crowed, "Kakashi-nii, I _did it!_ "

"Excellent work, Naruto." Kakashi came over to inspect Naruto's pieces of leaf. "Looks like you're ready to start learning your first wind jutsu."

"Aw yeah! I'm _so_ ready – believe it!" Naruto pumped a fist in the air. "What sort of awesome jutsu are we going to start with?"

"A very simple one."

"Awww…." Naruto deflated slightly. He got that learning elemental jutsus required time and patience, but Sasuke already knew half a dozen fire jutsus, and Naruto was sort of jealous. At least he had the satisfaction of knowing that he was _way_ better at breaking free of genjutsus than Sasuke was. Sakura had been practicing the basic genjutsu weaving that she was learning on them, and they hadn't found a genjutsu that could hold Naruto, yet.

"Once you have the basics down solidly, you'll be able to master more complicated jutsus much faster. And then you and Sasuke are probably going to be able to level a training field together, because even basic wind jutsus can augment fire jutsus to a _terrifying_ degree." Kakashi shuddered slightly at the thought.

Naruto perked up.

"Really?"

"Yup. Now, this is one of the first jutsus I ever purposefully copied. It's not actually a battle jutsu, but it's very good for practicing channeling the correct amount of chakra into a jutsu without worrying about it backfiring if you overdo it. Done just right," Kakashi formed three seals, "you should create a breeze just strong enough to flip someone's hair into their face. _Soyokaze no jutsu_." A breeze rustled through Naruto's hair and tickled his nose. "Minato-sensei invested it to tease Kushina when they first started dating."

And Naruto abruptly went from vaguely unimpressed to _one hundred percent invested in learning this jutsu_. Because this simple jutsu was a tangible piece of his _parents_. And it still amazed him that he had _parents_ now with _names_ and _faces_ , and it turned out that they were the heroes that Kakashi had been telling him about for _years_.

Naruto straightened up, completely focused.

"What happens if you do it wrong?"

"Too little chakra and nothing happens. Too much chakra and you can strip leaves off trees. Wind jutsus, like fire, can do a lot of collateral damage if you're not careful."

"Show me the seals again?" Naruto requested. He was going to _perfect_ this jutsu no matter what.

Naruto still didn't understand why Hokage-jiji hadn't just _told_ him who his parents were – he could keep a secret – but for now he wasn't asking, because he didn't want to get Kakashi-nii into trouble. Finding out the why could wait. The important thing was that Naruto knew the truth now.

* * *

Sasuke's collection of plants was growing. The pot of basil Naruto had given him had acquired a friend, because Sasuke was really enjoying having fresh basil on his tomatoes, but he didn't want to strip his plant bare. He'd bought the shiso plant on a whim, because it had smelled good, too, and cooking with fresh herbs tasted better. The cilantro and oregano had come home for similar reasons.

At that point, Sasuke had given up, bought a small bag of potting soil, and planted his assortment of herbs in the empty window box that his apartment had come with. Team 7 had done enough D-rank gardening missions at this point that it wasn't like Sasuke didn't know how, and besides, he was running out of windowsills. It was a miniature herb garden. It was practical, and he liked weeding it every few days and watering it.

The bonsai tree now sitting on his kitchen table, however, Sasuke had no excuse for.

Sasuke sat with his arms folded on the table and his chin resting on his arms, staring at the bonsai tree. What had possessed him to buy a _bonsai_? It wasn't practical. It wasn't useful. And he had no _idea_ how to take care of it. Sasuke had just liked the look of it. The shopkeeper had said that it was a good one for beginners.

The sensible thing to do would be to return the tiny tree, but that felt like giving up. Sasuke hated giving up. He'd have to see if he could find a book on bonsai trees, though, because he hated failing just as much as he hated giving up.

* * *

The idea had first been proposed by Gai. Apparently Neji was needed for some sort of clan business for the day, so Gai had proposed that their teams combine for morning training and an afternoon joint D-rank mission. Kakashi hadn't seen any reason to object. His students hadn't had a chance to spar with anyone else aside from himself and each other. Lee specialized in taijutsu, and Ten-Ten was primarily a long range fighter. It would be good practice for all of them.

Sakura and Ten-Ten had gone first. Ten-Ten had ultimately won their bought, but it had been very close. Kakashi was particularly impressed with the simple but highly effective genjutsu that Sakura had managed to weave that had apparently made it feel like something especially nasty was crawling up the back of Ten-Ten's neck. Ten-Ten was now explaining to Sakura how the seals on her weapons scrolls worked with the special enthusiasm that Ten-Ten seemed to reserve for weaponized projectiles.

Sasuke and Lee were up next. Kakashi was possibly hoping that this match up would remind Sasuke that, just because he had the best taijutsu skills of his teammates, that didn't mean that he didn't have plenty of room for improvement. Sasuke hadn't been getting a big head, per sae, but the Uchiha ego had practically been genetic and a gentle reminder never hurt anybody.

"Remember," Gai was telling Lee. Well, proclaiming to really, but that was just Gai's default state. "When fighting a sharingan user, never make eye contact! Instead, direct your Youthful gaze to their feet to predict their movements!"

"Yes, Gai-sensei!"

"Lee really only uses taijutsu?" Sasuke asked. After several minutes of irritated concentration, he'd finally managed to activate his sharingan.

"Yup."

"But _I_ don't have to stick to only taijutsu for this spar."

"Nope."

"Hn." Sasuke looked vaguely suspicious as well he should. It seemed Sasuke was finally starting to take 'looking underneath the underneath' to heart.

"To your positions!" Gai called.

Sasuke and Lee squared up and shifted into their preferred ready stances.

"Kick his ass, Bushy Brows!"

Sasuke shot Naruto an annoyed look.

"How come you never cheer for _me_ , dobe?"

"'Cause you don't need me to cheer for you, teme!"

Sasuke rolled his eyes but shrugged in apparent agreement and returned his attention to Lee. Ten-Ten and Sakura had stopped discussing weapons in favor of watching their teammates.

"Begin!"

* * *

"Right." Kakashi handed Sasuke an ice pack and set a cup of tea down in front of him. "Since you've activated the second level of your sharingan, it's time for the tricky discussion of the ethics and morals of sharingan use."

Sasuke pressed the ice pack to the darkening bruise on the side of his face that had just barely missed being a black eye. He hadn't even seen the kick coming. Lee was shockingly fast, and his kicks has the stopping power of a brick wall. If Sasuke had known that acquiring the second tomoe would make his eyes easier to control, he would have offered to spar with Lee _so much sooner_.

"Morals and ethics?" he asked.

"Mmm." Kakashi sat down across from Sasuke, pulled down his mask, and took a sip of his own tea. It still weirded Sasuke out how _casual_ Kakashi had gotten about the whole mask thing when their team wasn't in public. "Your cousin Shisui called it the Can-May-Should Principle."

Sasuke couldn't remember ever hearing his family talk about that.

"Never heard of it."

"Not all of the Uchiha clan followed it, and it made them… unpopular with a number of people," Kakashi sighed. "Right, so 'can.' Just because you copy a jutsu doesn't necessarily mean that you can perform it. Sometimes that's because the jutsu in question is based on a kekkei genkai, like Haku's ice mirrors or the Hyuuga's gentle fist. In the case of taijutsu, it can be because your body lacks the necessary physical training. I've been sparring with Gai for years. I've copied his movements with my sharingan at least a hundred times, but I would never use more than one or two of his moves in a battle, because his style takes a huge amount of specialized physical training that I haven't done. The sharingan is a shortcut, but it's not a substitute for actual training."

Sasuke nodded. He supposed that made sense.

"'May' applies to your fellow shinobi of Konoha. Yes, you can copy almost any jutsu you see one of your comrades use, but unless you have their permission, you really shouldn't be using those jutsus. A lot of shinobi view it as a type of theft, and it is a fast way to make yourself wildly unpopular and resented. Nobody cares if you copy basic elemental jutsus, but clan techniques and jutsus that your fellow shinobi invented themselves are definitely off limits. 'May' only gets ignored in life-or-death situations, and obviously it doesn't apply to enemies."

"So," Sasuke hesitated, "if I wanted to incorporate some of Lee's moves that I copied today into my own style…?"

"You need to talk to Lee first and most likely Gai as well since it's really Gai's style that Lee uses. Gai will probably require you to do some additional training with them if he does agree to it. And there is a good chance that he'll say no. Gai thinks of his style as a life style – I'm not sure what he'll say about someone wanting to only use select pieces from it." Kakashi took another sip of his tea. "At the end of the day, 'may' is really about respecting your fellow shinobi, and that's where past members of your clan ran into the most trouble." Sasuke grimaced but didn't deny it no matter how much he'd like to. "'Should' is more subjective. Basically, you've copied a jutsu. You _can_ perform it, and you _may_ perform it, but _should_ you perform it? I've copied at least a dozen jutsus that I would never perform – not because I can't, but because of the sheer level of sadism they require. That's the sort of judgment call that only you can make. Those same jutsus probably wouldn't cause most of the members of T&I to bat an eye, but for me, they go too far."

Sasuke finally tried his own tea.

"Sounds straightforward enough," he decided.

"It is," Kakashi agreed, "but that doesn't make it any less important."

* * *

Kakashi's shoulders finally relaxed as the arch of Konoha's gate finally passed above his head. He and his students had been out of the village for less than twelve hours on an escort mission that only counted as a C-rank because it involved leaving Konoha. After their disastrous Wave Country mission, though, Kakashi had been almost pathetically grateful that their exasperatingly easy and boring mission had stayed exasperatingly easy and boring. Team 7 had escorted the most paranoid watermelon farmer in Fire Country home. The man had been convinced that the 'watermelon mafia' was out to get him.

Ahead of him his students were still discussing exactly how a watermelon mafia might work since Naruto had never managed to get a satisfactory answer out of their hyper paranoid client.

"Maybe the watermelons _themselves_ have formed a mafia," Naruto suggested.

" _How_?" Sasuke countered.

"Someone mixed up the ingredients in the fertilizer they were making and as a result the watermelons gained sentience!"

"And grew legs?" asked Sakura. She'd worn her new, dark crimson, out-of-village dress for the day's mission. It was the same style as her bright red village dress, but the trim and circle on her back were black instead of white, making the whole ensemble much less eye catching. She'd also stuck a pair of senbon through the base of her bun like hair sticks.

"Absolutely," Naruto nodded mock seriously. "And now those watermelons are on a quest for vengeance because-"

"Boss!" Naruto was interrupted by an excited shout. "You're back! How was your mission?! Did you fight any more S-class missing-nin?!"

Konohamaru and his two friends, whom Kakashi still wasn't sure of the names of, were charging down the road to meet Naruto. Naruto waved and ran forward to meet them, shouting, "Hi Kotetsu-san!" as he blasted past the gatehouse.

"Did that child just call Naruto 'Boss'?" asked Sakura.

"Mhm," Sasuke nodded.

Sakura hesitated.

"Does that mean… Naruto has minions?"

Sasuke halted mid stride, a look of horror passing over his face.

Kakashi just smiled to himself.

* * *

A breeze rustled the leaves of the tree Team 7 was sitting under.

"That," Naruto decided, flopping on his back, "was _awesome_." He offered Sasuke a high five, and Sasuke solemnly slapped their palms together. Kakashi was leaning back against the tree trunk with one arm across his face.

"When I said that you and Sasuke could probably level a training field if you combined your wind and fire jutsus, I wasn't suggesting that you actually _try_ it," he groaned.

"That fireball was the size of a _house_ ," Sakura muttered. Her face was soot stained. "I've been working on my genjutsu – not earth jutsus. At least let me learn how to do walls before you idiots try that again."

"We weren't expecting it to be that big, Sakura-chan."

"You're both morons," Sakura decided.

"I'm going to have to fill out so much paperwork," mumbled Kakashi.

"That was a really cool water jutsu you used to put all the flames out, Kakashi-nii."

"My sharingan were activated when you did that jutsu," Sasuke piped up. "Can I use it next time we practice?"

"No. _Umi no tatsumaki no jutsu_ is an A-rank jutsu meant for melee fighting. It would take about half of your chakra reserves to perform at the moment. You can use it once your reserves are large enough that you can do it twice without passing out."

Sasuke let out an annoyed huff but didn't protest.

"You both owe me lunch for setting my dress on fire," Sakura announced. She held up her scorched and ruined hem and frowned at it.

"Yeah… it was supposed to go straight – not loop back on us."

"Barbeque?" Sasuke suggested.

Sakura considered this.

"Acceptable," she finally decided. She stood up. "Come on – nearly dying makes me hungry. Are you coming, Kakashi-sensei?"

Kakashi lifted his arm from his face. In the near distance, a few wisps of black smoke were still rising from Training Field 16. Overhead a messenger hawk wheeled and called. Looked like the Hokage was calling a general meeting. He stood up.

"I'll meet you there. The Hokage's calling a meeting. I shouldn't be more than half an hour."

"Want us to order your usual, nii-san?"

"Sure."

Kakashi took off for the Hokage Tower.

Was it really time for the chuunin exams already?

* * *

 _A/N: Thank you all for reading!_

 _Our latest translation courtesy of Google Translate:_

 _Umi no tatsumaki - "ocean tornado"_


End file.
